"Kirkus Reviews" says Walker is "too shrill, repetitive, and even snide", but nonetheless the book "does convey vividly the frightful mess that was Ayn Rand." A reviewer for "The Globe and Mail" said the book is "often clumsily written", but nonetheless provides "an absorbing portrait" of the movement that offers "striking glimpses" of its participants. In a review for "Liberty" magazine, R.W. Bradford describes the book as overly one-sided in its hostility and accuses Walker of hyperbole, fallacies and factual errors. In "The Guardian", David Cohen said Walker's book "may be even more hysterical than the movement he seeks to disparage". An overview of Rand's ideas aimed at businesspeople says the book "deserves a read, if only for its unremittingly negative interpretation of every facet of its topic." In a bibliographical guide to Rand's works and the literature about her, Mimi Reisel Gladstein says Walker "often depends on innuendo, rather than logic" and concludes, "There is material of interest here, but one has to pick through a lot of muck to get at it." In a review for the Objectivist magazine "Full Context", Chris Matthew Sciabarra says that Walker has some "valuable insights" and "theoretical points [that] need to be grappled with", but his book "ultimately disappoints" because Walker "exhibits the characteristics of a tabloid journalist" and engages in "endless tirades, strung together in a rather disorganized fashion, amounting to a series of vitriolic ad hominems directed toward most of the major figures in Objectivism."