Pardon my irreverence, but in my humble opinion jon stewart is a minuscule piece of maggot dung. Typical brain-dead libtard. Unfortunately, he's being paid a ridiculous salary to insult our intelligence - kinda like cramer! Only that obnoxious p.o.s., keith olbermann, can surpass them. puke.

What a grand read it was! I slugged through Atlas Shrugged about 40 yrs. ago, when I was 20 or so, and it was a truly eye-opening adventure. At the time I was a staunch liberal dumocrat, and this wonderful book certainly tore the blinders off for me. It kick-started the slow process of questioning the ultimate worth(less) of the very core concepts of the dumocrat party, which eventually led me to the conclusion that taken to it's ultimate end, the welfare state mentality was a self-defeating and nation-killing agenda. I now read comments on how uncannily timely the storyline is to our present circumstances - exactly what I was thinking in 1969! LBJ had just rammed his Great Society down our throats and chased it with the little debacle in Viet Nam (the dumocrats don't like to talk much about that, or Woodrow Wilson), and even back then I could see the horror beginning to unfold. Eventually I grew up and became an adult, and switched from dumocrat to Republican. I've noticed several comments on the length of the entire work, and some of the speeches therein. Remember, at the time of publication things moved more slowly and reading a great long book was a pleasure. Weren't no tv, xbox or home computers, and people hadn't morphed into instant-gratification wonks with attention spans measured in nano-seconds! Perhaps the problem is not the length of the novel, but instead our current perception of it. Having previously read several of Dostoyevsky's works along with War & Peace, I don't recall Atlas Shrugged being a particular challenge, or overly lengthy, but that was then, as they say, and this is now. READ IT AND ENJOY!