INTERVIEWS AND NOTICES
BOOK MAGAZINE (July / August 2003): 59-62.
Freedom won, lives lost, factories made safer: These are among the effects of the following remarkable books...
Jerome Kramer
Book magazine names the twenty books that changed America. Among them Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
On Atlas Shrugged, Sciabarra was interviewed by the magazine's editor-in-chief, Jerome Kramer.
"The book, with the rest of objectivist philosopher Rand's oeuvre, has exerted a powerful influence over its legion of devotees. In 1991, a survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book-of-the-Month Club rated Rand's novel the 'second most influential book for Americans' after the Bible. 'The effects that Rand has had on everything from politics to pop culture is actually remarkable,' observes the founding co-editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Chris Matthew Sciabarra. 'And when you start to trace her effects on rock bands like Rush or comics illustrators like Steve Ditko, or Alan Greenspan, who runs the Federal Reserve, there's no doubt that her influence is very broad and very deep.'"
 |
 |
 |