How much compassion is due someone who quite publicly hated the very idea of compassion? This question kept haunting me as I read Alexandra Popoff’s new biography of Alisa Rosenbaum, better known to the world as Ayn Rand. The life traced out in Popoff’s retelling (also discernible between the lines of Rand’s own novels and public pronouncements) conforms in broad outlines to what the literary critic Parul Sehgal dubbed “the trauma plot,” when violence a long way back is revealed at the end to ac
