Abstract

Stephen Cox's book, The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America, is a wellwritten, thoughtful, and exhaustively researched biography of a key pioneer in the libertarian movement. Isabel Paterson, who was a mentor to and close friend of Ayn Rand, had an accomplished career in her own right. From the 1920s to 1940s, she was a nationally respected, and sometimes feared, literary critic and best-selling novelist. Her masterwork, The God of the Machine, appeared in the same year as The Fountainhead and The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane.