Atlas celebration

I'm off on a road trip to Wellington today, heading for a Saturday night celebration that you might want to attend yourself: a celebration of Atlas Shrugged, the novel published fifty years ago this month that's still in Amazon's best-seller list, and richly deserves to be. "A quarter century after her death, and half a century after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism ... is back," says Forbes magazine.

"One of the most influential business books ever written," declared the New York Times recently about Atlas. "The only novel in all literature to come to grips with the most significant event of the last two-hundred years... to fully grasp the meaning of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution and to give them expression both in literature and in philosophy," says Robert Tracinscki. "With the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged," says Onkhar Ghate, "Ayn Rand became the most remarkable of individuals: a moral revolutionary. For anyone interested in ideas, it's a book that deserves to be read and re-read."

Read, re-read and celebrated! Join us Saturday night upstairs at Wellington's Murphy's Bar from 7pm: Shrugging Atlas Dave Henderson will speak, as will Lindsay Perigo, as will I, as will SOLO head Mitch Lees -- but none of us for too long, brevity being the soul of celebration. With special entertainment by SOLO's resident stand-up comic Matty Orchard and the fine brews of Murphy's fine establishment on tap, it promises to be a great evening celebrating this revolutionary novel. Join us!

Oh, and the art works? That's actually Hercules above, sculpted by William Brodie (1815-1881) -- a special prize to the person who picks the location -- and below is Bryan Larsen's Self Absolution of the Titan. And just to remind you of the power of Atlas Shrugged itself, This is John Galt Speaking.