Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

It has nothing to do with 'feeling' but rather the deserved evisceration of a simplistic, silly, book.

And you know as well a I do that this in particular IS a pertinent criticism of some posters on this board.

The book is a criticism of beliefs that no one holds, a denouncement of an ideology that no one believes in and condemnation of things that no one would ever say.

Not unlike a few posts on this board.

In 2005, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan said that Rand was "the reason I got into public service", and he later required his staff members to read Atlas Shrugged.[96][97] In April 2012, he disavowed such beliefs however, calling them "an urban legend", and rejected Rand's philosophy.[98]

Ryan was subsequently mocked by Nobel Prize-winning economist and liberal commentator Paul Krugman for his reportedly getting ideas about monetary policy from the novel.[99]

In another commentary, Krugman quoted a quip by writer John Rogers: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."[100]

Contemporary reviews[edit]

Atlas Shrugged was generally disliked by critics. Rand scholar Mimi Reisel Gladstein later wrote that "reviewers seemed to vie with each other in a contest to devise the cleverest put-downs"; one called it "execrable claptrap", while another said it showed "remorseless hectoring and prolixity".[68]

In the Saturday Review, Helen Beal Woodward said that the novel was written with "dazzling virtuosity" but was "shot through with hatred".[69] In The New York Times Book Review, Granville Hicks similarly said the book was "written out of hate".[70]

The reviewer for Time magazine asked: "Is it a novel? Is it a nightmare? Is it Superman – in the comic strip or the Nietzschean version?"[71] In the National Review, Whittaker Chambers called Atlas Shrugged "sophomoric"[72] and "remarkably silly",[73] and said it "can be called a novel only by devaluing the term".[72]

Chambers argued against the novel's implicit endorsement of atheism and said the implicit message of the novel is akin to "Hitler's National Socialism and Stalin's brand of Communism": "To a gas chamber—go!"[74]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged