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Title details for Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns - Available

Goddess of the Market

Ayn Rand and the American Right

by Jennifer Burns
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Worshipped by her fans, denounced by her enemies, and forever shadowed by controversy and scandal, the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a powerful thinker whose views on government and markets shaped the conservative movement from its earliest days. Drawing on unprecedented access to Rand's private papers and the original, unedited versions of Rand's journals, Jennifer Burns offers a groundbreaking reassessment of this key cultural figure, examining her life, her ideas, and her impact on conservative political thought. Goddess of the Market follows Rand from her childhood in Russia through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to bestselling novelist, including the writing of her wildly successful The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives. The book also traces the development of Rand's Objectivist philosophy and her relationship with Nathaniel Branden, her closest intellectual partner, with whom she had an explosive falling out in 1968. One of the Denver Post's Great Reads of 2009 One of Bloomberg News's Top Nonfiction Books of 2009 "Excellent." —Time magazine "A terrific book—a serious consideration of Rand's ideas, and her role in the conservative movement of the past three quarters of a century." —The American Thinker "A wonderful book: beautifully written, completely balanced, extensively researched. The match between author and subject is so perfect that one might believe that the author was chosen by the gods to write this book. She has sympathy and affection for her subject but treats her as a human being, with no attempt to cover up the foibles." —Mises Economics Blog

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 19, 2009

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780199740895

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780199740895
      • File size: 2652 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      September 7, 2009
      Ayn Rand's most famous books, The Fountainhead
      and Atlas Shrugged
      , continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands every year,decades after they were issued. She was a significant influence on Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Craigslist's Craig Newman. Rand remains many things to many people since her death in 1982, as she did throughout her prickly, anxiety-laced, amphetamine- and nicotine-fueled life. This biography and critique is exasperatingly detailed and slow-going at times. But what University of Virginia historian Burns does well is to explicate the evolution of Rand's individualist worldview, placing her within the context of American conservative and libertarian thought: from H.L. Mencken to William Buckley and later the Vietnam War—her opposition to it drove most conservatives crazy. Burns does not give short shrift to the men in Rand's life: her longtime husband, Frank O'Connor, and intellectual partner and lover, Nathaniel Branden. Overall, this contributes to an understanding of a complex life in relation to American conservatism. 12 b&w photos.

    • Library Journal

      October 27, 2009
      Twenty-five years after her death, Ayn Rand, novelist and creator of objectivist theory, is as revered and mocked a public intellectual as any of the 20th century. As the nation is caught in polarizing libertarian versus government debates, Rand is even more influential now than at the height of her popularity in the early 1960s. Here, Burns (history, Univ. of Virginia) produces a rigorously intellectual biography devoid of both condescension and deference. While Burns points out the inconsistency between Rand's belief in individualism and her demands for devout allegiance from like-minded fans, Burns gives credit to Rand's compelling rejection of state expansion when set against New Deal and Great Society currents. An early Goldwater enthusiast generally despised by the mainstream Right for her radical secularism, Rand had a fervor that was linked to her experience with Bolsheviks from whom she fled in the 1920s. Verdict Although dedicated Rand adherents and detractors will value Burns's depth, contextualization, and insightful interpretations, serious historians of American culture are the main audience for this excellent monograph.-Scott H. Silverman, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN

      Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

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Languages

  • English

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