Category Archives: literature
Atlas Is Shrugging
In Atlas Shrugged, a novel by Ayn Rand, the most productive and creative citizens in the United States — the innovators, risk-takers, artists, entrepreneurs, capitalists, intellectuals, industrialists — overturn the conventional concept of victimhood and go on strike, refusing any longer to be exploited by society, refusing to be demonized as too successful, too rich, too individualistic, too free. Continue reading
Literary Lion Obama Will Roar No More
Obama’s acolytes must find some convoluted new explanation to account for each unexpected deviance from the mythic overview. Continue reading
Our Road to Oceania
In George Orwell’s allegorical novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the picture of “Big Brother” appears constantly in the adoring media. America is not Oceania, but some of this is beginning to sound a little too familiar. Continue reading
Posted in current events, literature
Tagged 1984, censorship, fascism, free speech, obama, orwell, totalitarianism
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Dan Brown’s America
Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology. Continue reading
Between Experience and Reflection
Paul Hollander is not one of those sociologists who disdains to make his meaning clear to the average man, or at least to the average educated man. He knows that the search for meaning is one of man’s most salient characteristics, and he is capable of taking a comparatively small phenomenon and extracting the deeper significance from it. Continue reading
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The New Book Banning
It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away. Continue reading
Posted in current events, education, literature
Tagged censorship, consumer safety, education, free market, literature, regulation
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