Jennifer Burns Goddess of the Market Ayn Rand!

Must read for this weekend is the new Jennifer Burns book Goddess of the Market Ayn Rand covered last night here. Jennifer Burns’ new book on the life of Ayn Rand delivers in Goddess of the Market an exciting read. Jon Stewart spoke to Burns about the book Thursday night on Comedy Central.
Burns uses Rand’s unedited journals in an examination of Rand that is described as groundbreaking.
“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.”
The book carries you from Russia to Hollywood and confronts Rand’s relationship with Nathaniel Branden.
“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.
The Washington Times sees the book still timely, and has the power to instruct on the implications of current government trends:
“A smart assessment of Rand’s life and ideas and how they influenced each other… As Ms. Burns successfully demonstrates, Rand’s ideas have remained an important part of the American ideological mix, especially in how she honored the creative powers of American business in a free market to improve human lives. Ms. Burns’ readers will see Rand still has the power to instruct on the meaning and scary implications of government growth in the age of Barack Obama.”
Check it out online HERE


















