• • • The Atlas Shrugged Book Club Begins, Polarized But Polite 
Conor Friedersdorf, Garance Franke-Ruta, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Jerome Copulsky, The Atlantic Monthly - Politics Atlantic Monthly Atlas Shrugged Book Club  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | From: Conor Friedersdorf
To: Michael Brendan Dougherty, Jerome Copulsky, Garance Franke-Ruta
Subject: Part I, Chapters 1 through 5

Michael, Jerome, Garance:

As a kid, I read Atlas Shrugged three or four times, starting in sixth or seventh grade, all while attending Catholic schools in Orange County, California. It was one of my favorite books, and although it moved steadily down my all-time list as I discovered Tolstoy, Hemingway, Nabokov, Dostoevsky, Fitzgerald, and many others, I retain a fondness for it. In fact, I’d recommend reading it once to anyone. Like the Bible, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, Atlas Shrugged offers a radically different way of looking at the world that’s worth grappling with at least once. For many, the extremity of its vision is off-putting. Ayn Rand herself always insisted that her work wasn’t amenable to partial concurrences. Either embrace it wholeheartedly, she said, or reject it outright.   Published: 2013-02-18