Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand - Audio Book CD- Unabridged
Brand New -
Unbridged 50 CDs yes 50! - its 63 hours long!! - rare! Read by Scott Brick
This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world-and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battle 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 learn the answers 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 remarkable book.
About the Author: Ayn Rand was born in Russia, graduated from the University of Leningrad, and in 1926 came to the United States where she was naturalized. Her first novel, We the Living, was published in 1936. With the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943, she achieved a spectacular and enduring success and her unique philosophy, objectivism, gained a worldwide following.
Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged is Ayn rand's magnum opus, which launched an ideology and a movement. With the publication of this work in 1957, Rand gained an instant following and became a phenomenon. Atlas Shrugged emerged as a premier moral apologia for Capitalism, a defense that had an electrifying effect on millions of readers (and now listeners) who have never heard Capitalism defended in other than technical terms.
About Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the United States. It was Rand's last work of fiction before concentrating her writings exclusively on philosophy, politics and cultural criticism. At over one thousand pages in length, she considered it her magnum opus. The book explores a number of philosophical themes that Rand would subsequently develop into the philosophy of Objectivism.
The theme of Atlas Shrugged is that independent, rational thought is the engine that powers the world.
The main conflict of the book occurs as the "individuals of the mind" go on strike, refusing to contribute their inventions, art, business leadership, scientific research, or new ideas of any kind to the rest of the world. Society, they believe, hampers them by interfering with their work and underpays them by confiscating the profits and dignity they have rightfully earned. The peaceful cohesiveness of the world requires those individuals whose productive work comes from mental effort. But feeling they have no alternative, they eventually start disappearing from the communities of "looters" and "moochers" who bleed them dry. The strikers believe that they are crucial to a society that exploits them, and the near-total collapse of civilization their strike eventually triggers shows them to be correct.
Like the Greek Titan Atlas, individuals rationally and circumspectly seeking their own long-term happiness believe that they hold the world on their shoulders. The novel's title is an allusion to the Titan, discussing what might happen if those supporting the world suddenly decided to stop doing so. In the novel, the allusion comes during a conversation between two protagonists, Francisco d'Anconia and Hank Rearden, near the end of part two, chapter three, where Francisco suggests to Rearden that if he could suggest to Atlas that he do one thing, it would be to shrug.
In the world of Atlas Shrugged, society stagnated when independent productive achievers began to be socially demonized and even punished for their accomplishments, even though society had been far more healthy and prosperous by allowing, encouraging and rewarding self-reliance and individual achievement. Independence and personal happiness flourished to the extent that people were free, and achievement was rewarded to the extent that individual ownership of private property was strictly respected. The hero, John Galt, lives a life of laissez-faire capitalism as the only way to live consistent with his beliefs.
Atlas Shrugged is a political book. It portrays fascism, socialism and communism – any form of state intervention in society – as systemically and fatally flawed. However, Rand claimed that it is not a fundamentally political book, but that the politics portrayed in the novel are a result of her attempt to display her image of the ideal person and the individual mind's position and value in society.
Rand argues that independence and individual achievement enable society to survive and thrive, and should be embraced. But this requires a "rational" moral code. She argues that, over time, coerced self-sacrifice causes any society to self-destruct.
She is similarly dismissive of faith beyond reason, in a god or higher being, or anything else as an authority over one's own mind. The book positions itself against religion specifically, often directly within the characters' dialogue.
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