I read this book over twenty years ago. It’s a long 1100 pages, but it needed to be to make it the masterpiece that it is.
More than 10 million copies have been sold since 1957 when it was first published. It’s notable that over 500,000 copies were sold following the financial crisis in 2007 / 2008.
I find the book, (despite it’s age) is now as relevent as ever, because what it describes in great detail, is what’s been happening in New Zealand in the last few years, while covid had everyone distracted. Although the author of that trip (Jacinda Adern) has done a disapearing act, the damage has been done and is still ongoing.
I never dreamed when I read the book all those years ago, that I would end up living it. It’s as if the book has come alive like a bad dream, except it doesn’t go away when I wake up.
It’s hard to write about the plot in just a few words because there is so much going on, yet all the details are quite relevent in themselves.
The book depicts a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations. It becomes a ‘peoples state’ and starts falling apart due to corruption and legalised looting in much the same way that Zimbabwe and Venuezula have in the recent past.
Essentially, what happens is that, as the looters destroy the ecomony, some of the best producers and business people quietly disappear and setup themselves up in a hidden valley (a parallel economy). This speeds up the rate at which the country collapses, causing desperation as resources become scarce, because no one is producing them.
Eventually this leads to a climax and hope of a change of the culture that caused the problems in the first place.
I’m not sure the same conclusion will happen in New Zealand, yet a lot of us are ‘disappearing’ in plain view without anyone realising it. (early retirement, moving oversea’s, going self sufficient, etc)
A link to the plot is below. It’s a long read..
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/atlas-shrugged/book-summary
Uncoffined 
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