Well THIS is Interesting

I received an email this morning:

Dear Editor of The Smallest Minority,

According to Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has gone from fiction to fact in 52 years. If you haven't already, now is the time to finally read it, and I would be happy to send you a review copy.

Atlas Shrugged has received praise from Business Week, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fox, CNN.com, among others. Below is an article from the Ayn Rand Institute, explaining the significance of Atlas Shrugged and the tea parties that will be going on this weekend, July 4th.

If you like the article, please feel free to reprint it on your site. There are excerpts and other materials available. Please let me know if you'd like me to coordinate an interview with a representative from The Ayn Rand Institute. Feel free to contact me with your editorial needs.

I'm looking forward to working with you on this controversial novel.

This was from the Publicist for a book marketing company. It would appear that another industry has now embraced bloggers and blogs as a new way to reach a mass audience. Pretty cool, though I don't think I'm her particular target audience in this case.

Oh, and here's the rather brief article:

The Significance of Ayn Rand's Novel Atlas Shrugged
From The Ayn Rand Institute
"I refuse to apologize for my ability -- I refuse to apologize for my success -- I refuse to apologize for my money."

The U.S. economy is in shambles, with every nightly newscast bringing word of new government interventions. Americans are alarmed and desperate for answers: How did we get here? How will we recover? That might sound like a description of today's world, but in fact it's also a sketch of the world Ayn Rand created in her classic novel Atlas Shrugged.

The tea parties testify to the outrage that many Americans feel toward Washington's explosive growth in the past few decades -- especially under Presidents Bush and Obama. Atlas Shrugged not only gives voice to this outrage, it provides both a profound explanation of the cause of today's crisis -- and a positive, radical solution to it.

Why is it that every problem seems to call for increased government intervention at the expense of freedom? Why is it that businessmen inevitably take the blame for any crisis? Why are the most competent, most successful Americans smeared as greedy and selfish? To these questions and many others, Atlas Shrugged gives answers unlike anything you've ever heard.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out."

* * *

"If we who were the movers, the providers, the benefactors of mankind, were willing to let the brand of evil be stamped upon us, and silently to bear punishment for our virtues -- what sort of ‘good' did we expect to triumph in the world?"

* * *

'Yes, this is an age of moral crisis. You are bearing punishment for your evil. But it is not man who is now on trial and it is not human nature that will now take the blame. It is your moral code that's through, this time. Your moral code has reached its climax, the blind alley at the end of its course. And if you wish to go on living, what you now need is not to return to morality . . . but to discover it."

Learn the meaning of these quotes -- and the revolutionary ideas behind them -- by picking up Atlas Shrugged. Discover why Ayn Rand held that nothing less than a total separation between state and economics can save this country. Discover Ayn Rand's defense of the individual's moral right to pursue his own happiness -- the indispensable precondition of his political right to pursue his own happiness. Discover a gripping novel that challenges today's intellectual mainstream and provides an alternative to the anti-freedom ideas that are undermining American liberty.

Discover Atlas Shrugged.

Personally, I appreciate her philosophical essays far more than her attempts at novels, but your mileage may vary. I could not get through John Galt's 70+ page speech, myself.