Review of Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand And The American Right by Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty in The Washington Times:
Why is Rand, dead since 1982, so hot again today? Ironically, big government, one of Rand’s betes noires, is stimulating her sales. Her more than 1,000-page 1957 novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” sold 25 percent more copies in the first half of this year than it sold in all of last year, shipping a total of 300,000 copies so far this year – tremendous success for a 52-year-old novel.
Readers and pundits alike look at America and see a world scarily reminiscent of Rand’s government-choked dystopia in “Atlas.” It’s a world with a struggling economy where political pull matters more than success in the free market, where the government blithely takes over huge transportation industries.
You can read the rest here.