Jubilee Prosperity

The second review is ATLAS SHRUGGED by Harold Leiendecker:

INTRODUCTION

I was – shocked! – at the results of a 1998 Random House survey of literature experts, which named James Joyce’s Ulysses as the greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, Rosemary Yaco was reading the same news item; and she was – shocked! – that a concurrent Random House on-line poll of ordinary readers ranked Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as the greatest novel of the century.

That on-line poll was flawed. It involved a self-selected sample of people who had been alerted to it, and voted.

However, a legitimate survey, conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, in 1991, had asked what book had most affected readers’ personal lives. Atlas Shrugged placed second only to the Bible.

ATLAS AND ME

I first read Atlas Shrugged about 1961, on the recommendation of a friend. I was fascinated by the way it agreed so much with what I had begun to conclude about life, by my late 20s.

I was a left/right mixture.

I had had one foot in the liberal camp, in that I had worked at TVA as an engineering student, was a participant in the civil rights movement, and had become a religious skeptic.

I had chaired the Unitarian Board of Trustees in Baton Rouge. At the same time, I had become a huge believer in free markets, individual freedom, and industrial heroes, having worked seven years for Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey.

Ayn Rand’s magnum opus on reason and individual freedom explicated, and thus seemed to validate my evolving philosophy. It was a coherent integration of my views.

I have read the book twice, and listened to it on tape three times. But in true-believer circles, that leaves me still a piker.

AYN RAND

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 8:50 am and is filed under Prosperity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.