• • NR will review the new biographies of Ayn Rand in due course 

Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  | (Subscription required.)
NR will review the new biographies of Ayn Rand in due course. We reviewed another Rand-related book once upon a time ("Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal"--Whittaker Chambers on Atlas Shrugged, Dec. 28, 1957). Rand's abilities as a storyteller are hardly controversial: She still sells hundreds of thousands of copies a year, 52 years later. The financial crisis and the Obama crisis have made her analysis of liberalism and the welfare state timely again. She admired the country she came to as a refugee from Communism. But the most glaring weakness of her thought glares still. A political movement one of whose premises is that theists are stupid and theism wicked is a nonstarter in the United States--and would have been with every one of its founders, including Jefferson and Thomas Paine.  

• • Put down that pitchfork 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Also published under the title “American Gothic meets Ayn Rand ye gods” in the Fredericksburg (VA) Free Lance-Star.
I sympathize with the Grassroots Right in one way: Trying to blend conservatism with American folksiness is enough to make anybody start screaming in public. But what I can't forgive is their Cult of the Book. As soon as I saw the "Ayn Rand Was Right" signs at one town-hall meeting, I knew: People who rarely read any book at all were reading "Atlas Shrugged." I read it when it came out in '57 and still remember groaning halfway through, "OK! I get it! You can stop now!" But Rand didn't, and the Grassy Roots didn't. Some people read 50 books a year; others read one book 50 times, and you can always tell the difference by the pile-driving insistence on reiterating their points that they bring to town-hall meetings.  

•Fighting despair 
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Commentary on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Ayn Rand wrote an imaginative novel based on a society suddenly finding its members at liberty to seek out individual gratifications. From that fable, her anthem was born. The relevant factor in the Gulf catastrophe is indeed the individual's capacity to reject despair and to cope, however aimlessly, with what is brought on, the bus that will at some point be there, the bean soup that will quiet the hunger, and soon, someone's hand, to share, and mitigate the loneliness.