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Atlas Shrugged Kindle Edition
Who is John Galt? When he says that he will stop the motor of the world, is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battles not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves?
You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this book. You will discover why a productive genius becomes a worthless playboy...why a great steel industrialist is working for his own destruction...why a composer gives up his career on the night of his triumph...why a beautiful woman who runs a transcontinental railroad falls in love with the man she has sworn to kill.
Atlas Shrugged, a modern classic and Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism—her groundbreaking philosophy—offers the reader the spectacle of human greatness, depicted with all the poetry and power of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSignet
- Publication dateApril 21, 2005
- Reading age18 years and up
- File size2690 KB
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A philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller, Atlas Shrugged explores the nature of good and evil, the role of heroes and villains, and the power of human greatness.Popular highlight
An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.8,665 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.7,180 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.6,604 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.5,069 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
“Francisco, what’s the most depraved type of human being?” “The man without a purpose.”4,634 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Review
[A] vibrant and powerful novel of ideas.
-- "New York Herald Tribune"Countless individuals working to secure liberty have found inspiration in the works of Ayn Rand. With her unique ability to depict heroism, idealism, and romance behind the creativity of the individual, Rand inspires readers to come to the defense of free minds and free markets.
-- "Chip Mellor, Institute for Justice"Narrator Scott Brick takes listeners on a journey so extraordinary they'll hardly notice the book's length. While his performance offers little in the way of theatrics, Brick is capable of garnering sympathy and, perhaps most importantly, devout attention for Rand's plot and characters. On the surface, Brick's voice is a cool, unrelenting force determined to capture every facet of Rand's complex story. But amid his calm and collected delivery, he taps into a more colorful emotional palette that will keep listeners involved. Brick's subtle delivery holds far more than meets the ear.
-- "AudioFile"Atlas Shrugged is not merely a novel. It is also--or may I say: first of all--a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society.
-- "Ludwig von Mises, economist and historian"Ayn Rand is destined to rank in history as the outstanding novelist and most profound philosopher of the twentieth century.
-- "New York Daily Mirror"About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B003V8B5XO
- Publisher : Signet; Centennial edition (April 21, 2005)
- Publication date : April 21, 2005
- Language : English
- File size : 2690 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 1188 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #10,632 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #10 in Political Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #21 in Classic American Fiction
- #24 in Classic Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
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One of my favorite books - see the size of book and font
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About the author
Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936, followed by Anthem. With the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943, she achieved spectacular and enduring success. Rand's unique philosophy, Objectivism, has gained a worldwide audience and maintains a lasting influence on popular thought. The fundamentals of her philosophy are set forth in such books as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, and The Romantic Manifesto. Ayn Rand died in 1982.
(Image reproduced courtesy of The Ayn Rand® Institute)
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Her characters talk things to death, but she dramatizes ideas many readers, then or now, have never heard. She shows our protagonists’ pursuit of work and excellence to the exclusion of most other elements in life.
She defends how they live and shows how critical they are to a society which meanwhile disparages them for selfishness and fails to acknowledge the significance of what they contribute - and at the end of the day regulates them to death, seizes their wealth or both.
Characters like Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden make no excuse for being “selfish” in pursuit of work and productivity. They do it to make money for themselves and stockholders, and make no bones about that: it’s reason enough. But they also do it because it’s beautiful, in their minds, the highest personal endeavor. They’re the ones that keep society running and provide its necessities, although society can’t admit it.
There are many, many long, long, LONG conversations as Rand seeks to turn prevailing modern assumptions on their head: That we’re here primarily to help others. That allowing people to control their own property is selfish. That the government does a better job of running society and the economy.
At a more personal level, Rand does her best to inject different ideas into the mix. Her protagonists despise dependence upon others as well as any sense that you live for others. Dagny, in her burgeoning affair with the married Hank, regards him as owing her nothing. Her independence is refreshing. She’s not independent in a postmodern, feminist sense of rebelling resentfully against the men closest to her. She’s independent in that she can fend for herself, expects others to do the same, and doesn’t want a man to cling to her, either.
Our protagonists decry society’s looters and moochers – those who punitively tax the productive and those who whine to be helped.
Rand uses the great length to portray inside business and political dealings, less melodramatic but more complex than what’s usually portrayed elsewhere. It takes her a while to get around to it, but you finally see where she’s going: the government injects itself more and more into the process. Every owner here must answer to officials who look more and more like commissars. Every owner tries to get by using Washington fixers to keep the government off his back, but in the long run fails. The government starts dictating who gets what raw materials, how much they can produce and who to ship it to. Producers produce less and less, their industries start to fall apart, and thus so does society.
Rand’s prolixity is put to good use in descriptive passages finding the beauty of industry - of blast furnaces, of gleaming rail stretching across plains and hills, of fabulous new bridges and skyscrapers. These are the things people build, beautiful in themselves and in what they represent: ideas proved right, energy, will, intelligence, investment, hard work, science, technology. These industrial artifacts are usually portrayed as ugly from a postmodern or environmental perspective by the ‘we’re raping Mother Earth’ school.
What was gained by such industry – steel, transportation, habitats and offices – and what was gained by all those – more places to live one’s life and seek one’s dreams, and a larger world to do it in – is often ignored and forgotten. And you can’t forget that. Those who want you to give it up, and will institute regulation or revolution to force you to, never seem to say how they’d substitute for it. And when given the chance to – Communist countries with complete and dictatorial control – they invariably fail. Your typical revolutionary couldn’t run a candy store, let alone a railroad.
There was a film called “Koyaanisqatsi” back in the 1980s, an American Indian word that meant “world out of balance”. It consisted entirely of video, much of it time-lapse, of human construction upon the planet. We were supposed to perceive it all as ugly. But the bands of light, say, streaming from thousands of cars moving in mesmerizing lines at night along urban highways was actually beautiful, which is why anyone watched the movie until the end. It disproved its own point.
The book has numerous flaws, more than a classic normally should, but it is so unique, it’s worthwhile despite it. There are too many endless conversations and interior monologues. Rand disparages feelings, as opposed to thought, but much of the book consists of her characters emoting. Well, OK, they’re thinking, the protagonists anyway (the bad guys, particularly near the end, are shown panicking, in ways they can’t verbalize, thought having succumbed to emotion) but it’s a very fine line. This book would be better at half or a third of the length. I have read that Rand used benzedrine, a stimulant, for three decades; if so, this book bears evidence of it. It would explain why so many of her passages go on for so long, far longer than it takes to actually explicate the thoughts in question, and counterproductive to the causes of holding readers or communicating, which I imagine she’d in normal circumstances have held dear.
John Galt’s legendary speech – said in the book to take three hours, but I imagine this would take even longer to actually read aloud; it’s 60 pages in one hardcover version – is in its own category. Rand lays out her philosophy the way philosophers do. It will cross the eyes of anyone else, those not greatly concerned with whether, say, existence can prove its own existence. But I’m willing to stipulate that political philosophies at some point and for some fraction of people must be proven in this way.
Rand at times writes like a girl; I say this affectionately. Dagny Taggart generally beats the guys (save for a few who are her equals, like Francisco D’Anconia and Hank Reardon) at their own game. She’s tough, competent, decisive and hard-working. But there is a tremendous amount of melodrama attached, not only to her, but to all of them. She’s always appearing at some important scene straight from some party in her formal evening wear, her strapless gown blowing in the wind, a striking, mesmerizing figure. (‘I Dreamed I Smashed The Collectivist Looter State in My Maidenform Bra.’)
And all the key men in the book are in love with her! And she has to choose! Oh, what to do, what to do?! It’s so awful! It’s so wonderful! Oh, TAKE ME!
It’s a lot of fun, actually, because it’s part of a book that actually says something.
For starters, this book is a disaster if viewed purely in novelistic terms. I cannot recall having ever seen more stilted characters nor can I recall having seen worse dialogue. I understand what Rand was going for when she sought to present her objectivist philosophy in the context of a novel, but I wish she wouldn't have tried to do that. A philosophical tract is a philosophical tract, and a novel is a novel. Perhaps it is possible to join the two, but I don't think it was done effectively here.
I also think Rand's philosophy itself took an unfortunate turn as she settled into life as a U.S. celebrity and became more prone toward playing to her crowd. If you take the core plot elements of "Atlas Shrugged" and set them against the backdrop of Rand's formative years (in Russia at the time of the Bolshevik revolution and on the wrong side, so to speak) and the subsequent history of planned economies, you'd see that Rand has much to say that is extremely relevant to us. Had she stuck to being a pure novelist, as she seemed to be with "We the Living," the message might have gotten through quite well. Unfortunately, as she pushed the philosophy further and further, perhaps based on the need to play to her core audience, I think she took it to places where it didn't really need to go and which detracted from her core ideas. Example: John Galt, the hero of "Atlas Shrugged," is being pressed by government leaders to become Economic Dictator and fix the mess into which society has plunged. Were this to happen, one of the things Galt says he'd do is to abolish all taxes. Among readers, that clearly resonates with political extremists on the right, and objectivists do like to argue for this sort of thing. But there's a problem. In the book, it comes completely from out in left field. There is nothing in the story to suggest John Galt, Hank Reardon, Francisco D'Anconia or any other vanishing industrialist was oppressed by taxes or even the sort of government regulations we deal with today. Nothing in the book suggests they'd have a problem with the EPA, with OSHA, with the FTC, with providing health insurance for their employees, etc. A bad line like that probably did much to play to the Rand groupies but it cheapens the fiction because when we shake our heads at its absurdity, we focus away from the substantial kinds of oppression the industrialists did face in the novel.
As you read the boom, it really is vital that you develop a knack for filtering out the junk that's been put in there to please the groupies many of who, by the way, seem just-plain crazy. I'm still perplexed at the absurdity of an interview with a Rand-follower in connection with the recent Atlas Shrugged movie who ranted hysterically about how taxes and regulation had destroyed our ability to innovate. Interestingly, though, the diatribe was delivered through Yahoo! Finance on-demand streaming video easily accessible via tablet or even pocket-sized smart phone. Tell me again about the lack of innovation!
To appreciate "Atlas Shrugged," you really have to edit the philosophy to adjust for stupidity thrown in by Rand to please the whackos, whether or not she eventually believed in the nonsense herself.
Perhaps the best way to appreciate the bona fide substance of this novel is to use one of the reading strategies taught today to kids in elementary and middle school: look for text-to-life associations. Right from the earliest chapters, I found countless situations, attitudes, etc. that were EXACTLY like those I encountered many times in the corporate world, where ideas of thinkers are routinely "looted" not by government officials seeking social re-distribution but by legions of high-salaried PowerPoint jockeys devoid of talent or ideas but highly adept at perpetuating their positions. As James Taggart spoke, I constantly heard it as the voice of a business development person at my former company. As Wesley Mouch did his thing and as the Unification Boards strutted, I constantly saw in my mind the legions of what my company referred to as "business owners" (vapid twenty- and thirty-something kids who were put in charge of things they didn't care about or understand causing many a great idea to wither). As to the strike, the withdrawal of the industrialists, I did something like that at my company when I walked away from a product I struggled to launch. I finally yielded it to the business owner (as a result of "Atlas Shrugged," I re-named her Orren Boyle since she was exactly like that character) by quitting the division. The product collapsed within a couple of months. Actually, Orren Boyle, a politically-connected by incompetent steelmaker was better than the lady with who I worked. He wanted to latch onto profits produced by dynamic innovative Reardon Steel (hence his advocacy for a unification scheme that would distributes all profits produced by all steelmakers based on the number of boilers owned regardless of whether the boilers are actually operational). But when Reardon refused to produce at a loss to feed profits to Boyle and instead proposed that the government simply seize his company and give it to Boyle, the latter had a fit; he knew he'd screw it up. The business owners at my former company had no such self-awareness. They were happy to doers exit, and if an idea subsequently collapsed, as often happened, they'd simply look to loot another one. There are countless more precious scenes like this, far too many to enumerate here.
Forget the right-wing extreme propaganda. Forget the objectivist whackos. If you are able to filter that out and really make the text-to-life associations as taught to school kids, you will see, here, the penultimate novel of our modern corporate world, the battle between those who generate ideas and those who live to loot them. This is a novel that exalts individual thought, individual initiative, individual accomplishment, individual creativity, individual responsibility, etc. and exposes the legions of parasites, shirkers ("It's won't!"), whiners ("I don't know how it can be done; I just know you have to do it!"), looters, etc. for what they are. It's a novel we badly need not just in dealing with the public sector but in dealing with the private sector (perhaps more since we are, in fact, a capitalist economy) and maybe even in our personal lives (wait till you meet Hank Reardon's brothe; Does you family have one of those!).
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Stylistically, the work has aged pretty well, a bit 1940's/50's "Marlow" noir in flavor, although some sections come across as overly melodramatic, especially the romantic interactions. There are a number of brilliant set pieces, but also sections where you really wish for a bit more editing. And of course there is the famous grand philosophical monologue towards the end that takes a few sittings to get through!
These are nit-picks in the grand scheme of things. In our society as it is, the message - especially to the young - of individual self-worth and achievement in the face of a society that damns it implicitly and explicitly is so important.
The book remains a master-work, and as most know, is an exposition of her "Objectivist" school of philosophy. Is the world ultimately more complex? Sure - but this book takes a clean cut across the rubic cube of life providing a vital perspective to integrate into the whole.
Reviewed in India on May 8, 2024
Dizem que Ayn Rand era feminista, mas acho que é só porque ela colocou como heroína da história uma mulher. Mas uma mulher bem feminina.
E isso é o de menos, diante da preocupação de todos de um mundo se corrompendo. Os muçulmanos uma vez disseram que iriam dominar o mundo e sem dar um tiro, porque achavam que o mundo ocidental iria se implodir. E o livro mostra os países americanos e europeus morrendo, o que estamos vendo hoje.
Tentei assistir ao filme, mas o livro de 10 a 0, nos seus detalhes sobre pensamentos e filosofias de vida, que são cortados do filme.