Buckley Report: Atlas Shrugged
(Fox 8 News) - "Atlas Shrugged" is considered among the most powerful books ever written. Ayn Rand's novel is considered the second most influential book of all time, just behind the Holy Bible and ahead of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Road Less Traveled," in a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club. Bob Buckley looks at the book's impact on some of America's most successful people.
posted by BP News Bureau | 8:35 PM
4 Comments:
How ironic.
One of the themes of Atlas Shrugged was corporate incompetence. The pinheads at Fox 8 have managed to screw up the link so the only thing that plays is the commercial.
Miss Rand is chuckling right now, I'm sure.
UPDATE:
I left the page up on my browser and after about 20 minutes, the clip started playing. Way to go, Fox 8.
It's not a bad report, although it is pretty much fluff. I found it interesting that the President of BB&T is so strongly influenced by it. It shows in their business practices. Remember that BB&T announced shortly after the execrable Kelo decision that they would not loan money for any project that relied on eminent domain to obtain property.
I can tell you that next time I'm in the market for a bank, BB&T will top my list of potentials.
Ah, Atlas Shrugged ... I can see the 'influential book' thing, as it is quite a book. So quite the book that, I must admit, I'm not finished with it yet; I'm on page 280 (of nearly 1200 pages) and it's not what you call a simple read. Not that it's hard to read; it's not verbose (a la Umberto Eco's stuff, another Steve fave that I do really like a lot), but there's just a lot of words in Atlas Shrugged. This isn't a diss, and I think she's a great mind, but not a natural writer: she writes good ideas with difficult diction, or something. I will finish it, though (as soon as I finish what I've temporarily turned to: Schulz, an incredible biography of Charles Schulz, the creator of 'Peanuts').
I was able to take a break from Atlas Shrugged for a couple of reasons. One, I could see where it was going, and it depressed me; two, it pissed me off way too much about my own work. Nevertheless, it's still fun because it seems to be true, if that makes sense.
As has been pointed out before, Miss Rand was a great thinker, but a lousy novelist. She seemed to be dedicated to the notion of "philosophy for the masses." Unfortunately, her prose is so stilted and her characters so wooden, she would have been better off expressing Objectivism in non-fiction. So Atlas Shrugged is one of the great books of all time, in terms of its ideas, while coincidentally being one of the worst novels of all time. Someone should have told Miss Rand that having her characters interrupt the story for a 100-page soliloquy doesn't make for gripping reading.
If you are on page 280, Strother, I doubt you know where the book is going. Among her many faults as a novelist, Miss Rand was definitely not obvious. The book depressed me as well, in the end, but I'll bet it wasn't for the same reasons that it depresses you.
I've been giving non-fiction a break lately. I've been re-reading Frank Herbert's fabulous Dune series. Now there's someone who could tell a story. And what an interesting take he had on the marriage of religion and politics. I'll be back to non-fiction soon, though, since Vox Day's The Irrational Atheist and Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism should arrive from Amazon any day now.
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