Barbara Branden, perhaps best known as the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), and as co-author, with then-husband Nathaniel Branden, of Who is Ayn Rand? (1962), died on December 11th. The actress Julie Delpy played Barbara in a TV movie based on The Passion of Ayn Rand, and sharing that name, which aired in 1999. No less of a legend than Helen Mirren played the titular protagonist. Given the above two paragraphs, you may well see the headline above as odd. But as Branden tells us in The Passion , and as many of the obits have mentioned, BB did study philosophy with the Marxist/pragmatist/and eventual neocon Sidney Hook, at New York University. She defended Hook in conversations within the Randian circle as someone who was committed to reason. I'd rather write about Hook than about Rand any day. In the era in which BB knew him, Hook was known as the author of Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933)and From Hegel to Marx (1936). Th...