The lede from a story in Saturday's NYT:
One of the most influential business books ever written is a 1,200-page novel published 50 years ago, on Oct. 12, 1957. It is still drawing readers; it ranks 388th on Amazon.com's best-seller list.
Twenty-eight paragraphs later:
Every year, 400,000 copies of Rand’s novels are offered free to Advanced Placement high school programs. They are paid for by the Ayn Rand Institute …
I shrugged.
The story is currently the fifth-most emailed. It is unclear whether all transmissions are stemming from the ARI, or if some have also come from the Cato Institute.
3 comments:
When I read the Fountainhead, I realized at one point that I'd skipped about 5 pages. It mattered not at all to the story; and the prose was so awful that I couldn't tell where one sentence began and the other ended.
Spot on, Clare. Murky prose through a glass darkly and Libertarian nonsense although they didn't call it that in those days back in the 30s. Rand must have admired Hitler because he took a bold, independent stand and ignored the Untermensch. Instead of skipping 5 pages the book can be improved by skipping 500 pages. lol
A friend gave me The Fountainhead once upon a time, and I tried to read it. Even though I really liked this friend, I just could not make it through the book.
I mentioned this to my mother some time after, and she said, "You're too old for that book."
I was in my mid-20s at the time.
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