• • • Inside the New York Times Book Review - October 30, 2009 
Sam Tanenhaus, New York Times Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Audio  Audio. Interview with Anne C. Heller, author of Ayn Rand and the World She Made.[Q:] What’s the attraction of Ayn Rand? [A:] Ayn Rand herself said she put flesh on the bones of conservatism, of radical individualism and free-market capitalism. Being a Russian, at birth, she grew up with Russian social novels and felt that the way to deliver ideas most compellingly was through fiction.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand 
Jennifer Burns, Harvard Magazine Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  PDF version (with additional photo).Ayn Rand was finally getting her due. After Time magazine had called her masterpiece—the novel Atlas Shrugged—“a nightmare,” after the eminent philosopher Sidney Hook had savaged her in the New York Times Book Review, she had been invited to Harvard to present a paper on her philosophy of art. Her host, John Hospers, a rising young philosopher from Brooklyn College, belonged to the American Society for Aesthetics, which was meeting in Cambridge in October 1962. Rand’s appearance at Harvard marked a pinnacle in her already astonishing career.     Share on Facebook

• • • Capitalism’s martyred hero 
The Economist Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Personal life  Reviews of two Ayn Rand biographies: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne Heller and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns. Anne Heller is more informative on Rand’s early years in Russia. Jennifer Burns is better versed in conservative thought. Both are well worth reading, partly because Rand’s life was so extraordinary and partly because the questions that she raised about the proper power of government are just as urgent now as they ever were. Rand was the single most uncompromising critic of the collectivist tide that swept across the capitalist world in the wake of the Depression. For her, government was nothing more than licensed robbery and altruism just an excuse for power-grabbing. Intellectuals and bureaucrats might pose as champions of the people against the powerful. But in reality they were empire builders who were motivated by a noxious mixture of envy and greed. Rand’s heroes were a different breed: the businessmen and entrepreneurs who felt the future in their bones and would not rest until they had brought it to life.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller 
Francine Prose, Bookforum Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  Night of January 16th  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  (Registration required.) Book review.Heller portrays Rand as a woman who was at once a phenomenon of courage and self-determination, a monster of egotism and narcissism, a sharp logician, and a fanatic ideologue. She never glosses over the awfulness of Rand’s public and private behavior (Rand appeared as a friendly witness to help the House Un-American Activities Committee root out the Communist menace threatening Hollywood), and she cites the lies and half truths that Rand told about subjects ranging from her family background to the philosophical influences that helped form the ideas she claimed to have invented. Yet Heller defends Rand from the critics who have gleefully and unjustly, in Heller’s opinion, savaged her novels. As a champion of Rand’s talent, Heller has her work cut out for her, especially when it becomes necessary to summarize the plots of Rand’s books, narratives even more implausible and melodramatic in outline than at their full and often inordinate lengths.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand and the World She Made 
Anne C. Heller, New York Times Atlas Shrugged  The Virtue of Selfishness  Personal life  Excerpt from Ayn Rand And The World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.Intelligent, self-directed, and solitary from an early age, Rand must have been a difficult child to raise in the first decade of the twentieth century. In spite of the era's violence and turmoil, the ambience was Victorian: the fashions were for frills, family loyalty, and the feminine arts, all of which went utterly against her grain. Some of her earliest memories were of being unreasonably treated in such matters by her mother, who was the dominating personality in the household and even at times "a tyrant." In one memory, during the family's move to the Nevsky Prospekt apartment, Rand and her younger sisters were sent to stay with a neighboring aunt and uncle, perhaps the Konheims. When they returned to Rand's new home, she asked her mother for a midi blouse like the ones she'd seen her cousins wearing. Anna Rosenbaum refused. She didn't approve of midi blouses or other fashionable garments for children, Rand recalled fifty years later. Anna was serving tea at the time, and — perhaps as an experiment — Rand asked for a cup of tea. Again her mother refused; children didn't drink tea. Rand refrained from arguing, although even then the budding logician might have won the argument on points. Instead, she asked herself, Why won't they let me have what I want? and made a resolution: Someday I will have it. She was four and a half or five years old, although all her life she thought that she had been three. The elaborate and controversial philosophical system she went on to create in her forties and fifties was, at its heart, an answer to this question and a memorialization of this project. Its most famous expression was a phrase that became the title of her second nonfiction book, The Virtue of Selfishness, in 1962.     Share on Facebook

• • A novel way to play Cisco 
Steven M. Sears, Barron's Atlas Shrugged  Atlas can't really afford to shrug these days. He now depends on government largesse to prop up the economy, the housing market, auto makers and other broken industries. One could write a book about the contradictions, but we'll leave that to novelists like Ayn Rand. On Wall Street, it pays to take things as they are, and forget about irony.     Share on Facebook

• • Sanford continues to embarrass S.C. 
John Landers, Daily Journal (Seneca, SC) Governor Sanford’s article in the current issue of Newsweek magazine is not clear as to whether he intended it as a book review, promotion of Ayn Rand for some political office, or just more ranting about his wacko ultra-libertarian political ideas. What is obvious is that he continues in his apparently delusional separation from reality. Maybe someone could take him aside and explain to him that Ayn Rand’s books are fiction. Pretend. Make believe. Kind of like imaginary hiking trips on the Appalachain Trail. Ayn Rand’s writings should certainly provide no model for our state’s governance (or, in Mr. Sanford’s case, non-governance). Every day that Mr. Sanford continues in office is an embarrassment, and it is high time that our legislature gave him the boot.     Share on Facebook

• • Charity and sacrifice in a free society 
Andrew Foy and Brenton Stransky, American Thinker The Virtue of Selfishness  It is one of the fundamental rights and duties of a free man to decide what and whose needs appear to him most important. Ayn Rand was less loquacious in her explanation, "only individual men have the right to decide when or whether they wish to help others; society - as an organized political system - has no rights in the matter at all."     Share on Facebook

• In clods we trust, Dow reacts to consumer spending drop 
Paul Wallis, Digital Journal Capitalism  The world wants out of this recession. That’s not going to happen unless Wall Street gets its collective pin head out of its eternal self psychoanalysis and starts figuring out ways of making that happen through sane financing. It might also want to remember where the money comes from. Markets might be an alternate reality, but they’re not self supporting. Ayn Rand isn’t coming back for an encore anytime soon.     Share on Facebook

• • We the Living 
Duncan Shepherd, San Diego Reader We The Living  Movie review.An adaptation of the Ayn Rand novel about post-revolutionary Russia, produced in wartime Italy and exhumed decades later with "Censored" stamped on it. The suppressed movies of an earlier generation are liable to look pretty untitillating, especially ones suppressed by totalitarian regimes. And in truth this one looks more quaint than anything else: an anti-Communist tract sweetened with a Frank Borzage-like doomed romance (secret trysts amid showers of soap flakes, soft-focus closeups, sniffling violins). You might have thought that a harsh portrait of the Soviet Union would hit the spot with a Fascist government on the opposite side of the WWII battlelines. But no. All totalitarians whatever tend to be touchy about exactly the same things.     Share on Facebook

• • • For liberty lovers ‘We The Living’ arrives on DVD 
Andrew Leigh, Big Hollywood We The Living  Personal life  An extraordinary film just came out on DVD which couldn’t be more timely. It’s about a fiercely outspoken, beautiful woman trapped in a country rapidly descending into socialism, with the government steadily ratcheting up control over all aspects of life. No, it’s not The Ann Coulter Story. The movie is We The Living, based on the Ayn Rand novel of the same title. Rand said that We The Living “is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write.”     Share on Facebook

• Republicans attack size of house health care bill 
Brian Montopoli, CBS News Atlas Shrugged  Conservatives are having fun going after the size of the legislation; Fox News' Neil Cavuto brought a speed reader on his show to go through it for viewers. "It's longer than 'War and Peace,'" columnist S.E. Cupp said on Sean Hannity's show. "It's longer than 'Atlas Shrugged.' And it's longer than 'Les Mis.'"     Share on Facebook

• Hannity slams 1900-page health care bill 
Sean Hannity, FOXNews.com Atlas Shrugged  TV show transcript.HANNITY: I can't imagine this. How does anybody read this thing? [S.E. ] CUPP: It's longer than "War and Peace." It's longer than "Atlas Shrugged." And it's longer than "Les Mis."     Share on Facebook

• Hotline after dark—Atlas shrugging at the new house health care bill 
National Journal Atlas Shrugged  The new House health care bill got mixed results from pols and pundits on TV 10/29 p.m. [....] Columnist S.E. Cupp: "It's longer than 'War and Peace.' It's longer than 'Atlas Shrugged.' And it's longer than 'Les Mis'" ("Hannity," FNC, 10/29).     Share on Facebook

• Reform joins the dirty brigade 
Peter Wognum, Director of Finance Online Capitalism  The evidence suggests that there is a growing movement of right wing, free market, objectivist lobbying that seeks to convince us that the best way to make us all feel better is to ignore the reality that is being shown us by science and drilling reports and to revert to the old paradigm of throwing money at ‘stuff’ without any serious consideration of whether that ‘stuff’ has any relevance in a new global economy that will be based on, and subject to, dramatically different drivers to those that ruled in the run up to the current century.     Share on Facebook

• • Let’s talk about sexonomics 
Brian Flaherty, Michigan Daily (U of MI, Ann Arbor) Rand’s popularity on college campuses and elsewhere has stemmed largely from the appeal and controversy of her views on topics like rationality and capitalism, but she also had a very interesting perspective on relationships, which could be described as laissez-faire meets sexuality. Her view that relationships should be an exchange of value, in many ways parallel to an economic transaction, is both useful for thinking about modern relationships and increasingly reflective of a reality in which it’s okay (and, in many cases, ideal) to shop around.     Share on Facebook

• • YAL hosts Southern Students conference 
Adam Edwards, Old Gold & Black (Wake Forest U, Winston-Salem, NC) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Many of the speakers focused on the philosophic underpinnings of the concept of liberty rather than on pure politics or economics. Among them was John Allison, who spoke on the core values of BB&T, which strongly emulate those of Objectivist philosophy, and Brandon Turner of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, who spoke on classical liberalism.     Share on Facebook

• • Hayek and health care 
E.D. Kain, True/Slant Capitalism  Is it possible the right is merely obsessed with opposition? If McCain had won, would conservatives be taking the hard-line Randian stance, or would the lack of simply being in opposition put them on more of a Hayekian footing? Being out of power has an odd way of returning a group to its supposed ideological roots – of purifying it, so to speak. At some point, though, we have to decide which roots we ought to be going back to, and in the conservative legacy there are many to choose from. Hayek and Rand are both central figures in that history, for all their differences, and choosing to adopt one’s vision over the other’s has serious implications. Rand is a more stalwart companion if your goal is to simply oppose rather than become a governing partner, and so the movement – so entirely devoted to its obligation to oppose – has put Rand on its pedestal. It’s a shame really, because healthcare reform is such an opportunity not only to help a good few Americans gain insurance, but to reform out-of-control entitlements, and a health insurance status quo that is anything but sustainable or fair. Like Andrew [Sullivan], I think this is a moral question above anything else – even the question of cost-containment, to me, is a moral question.     Share on Facebook

• • Mark Sanford, adieu! 
Gina Welch, True/Slant Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Tthis article [Mark Sanford] wrote for Newsweek isn’t about free love, though you wouldn’t know that from the title–”Atlas Hugged.” It basically just advocates small government, triumph of the individual, you know, the ground-breaking, objectivist, nouveau-Trickle-Down, anti-regulatory bullshit that delivered us to the beautiful Randian utopia we live in now…but I have to think the Newsweek editors are winking a little here, letting Sanford trumpet rugged individuality when his…individuality caused him so many problems.     Share on Facebook

• Coming of age 
Sathya Saran, DNA (India) Meera and Muzaffar Ali brought poetry to the ramp today. Swinging, soft lines, amasingly deft combinations of weaves in organza and silver, Benarasi silk combinations for festive wear and young, hip western tops in chikan teamed with black trousers, slim pants and palazzos made up the very eye-catching collection. [....] At the other end of the spectrum, with sharp lines and bright prints was Prashant Verma's ode to the Ego, dedicated to an almost forgotten Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook