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Ayn Rand & The World She Made: Q&A with Anne C. Heller

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 EST

Anne C. Heller's critically acclaimed and best-selling 2009 book, Ayn Rand and the World She Made, is new in paperback (we're tempted to say that it makes a great Christmas gift, though it's clear that Rand didn't believe in the holiday or the altruism that attaches to it!).

Reason's Nick Gillespie talks with Heller about Rand, whom the biographer says remains the great explicator of capitalism's virtues and remarkably undervalued by the literary establishment.

"How many novelists of ideas do we have in post-war America?" asks Heller, who says the most surprising thing she learned about Rand during her research was her fearfulness. From double-locking doors to wearing heavy rubber gloves while washing dishes to avoid germs, Heller argues that Rand bore the scars of a Jewish childhood spent in the virulently anti-Semitic confines of czarist Russia and the fledgling Soviet Union.

As Gillespie noted in his review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market, Heller's biography is a rich, sympathetic treatment of a major cultural figure that simultaneously analyzes and humanizes Rand's major, continuing influence on 20th- and 21st-century America.

Approximately 6.30 minutes. Shot by Jim Epstein and Adam Hawk Jensen. Edited by Josh Swain.

To watch Reason.tv's video series about Ayn Rand, Radicals for Capitalism, go here.

To read Reason's archive of articles about Rand, go here

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The Cold War Never Ended

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:00:00 EST

On November 9, 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Reason senior editor Michael C. Moynihan discussed his article "The Cold War Never Ended" on the Kremlin-backed television station Russia Today and who—if anyone—deserves credit for killing off the evil empire.

Return to the Gulag

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST

Jon Utley was two years old in Moscow when his father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, a Russian trade official, was sent to a labor camp by the Soviet secret police. His mother, Freda Utley, escaped with Jon to England and then to America.

In 2004 and 2006, Utley, a well-known journalist, embarked upon a search to learn of his father's fate. This documentary traces Utley's journey through former labor camps and cities in northern Russia and his final uncovering of the horrible truth at the dreaded camp city of Vorkuta within the Artic Circle.

Directed by John J. Michalczyk, Return to the Gulag is a small but revealing window into Russia's turbulent 1930s.

Reason.tv is proud to present this Etoile Production, which was funded by The Freda Utley Foundation and the Jacques Salmanowitz Program For Moral Courage in Film at Boston College. Thanks also to the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation.

For more information about the documentary, visit http://fredautley.com/Berdichevsky.htm.

For a DVD version of this program ($15 donation, plus shipping), please go to the website of The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation or email vocmemorial@aim.com.

The Reason.tv Talk Show, Episode 7

dan.hayes@reason.org (Dan Hayes) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:00:00 EST

On December 16, Reason's Nick Gillespie and Michael C. Moynihan sat down with the journalist Jon Utley, the subject of the excellent new documentary about his father's death in a Soviet labor camp, Return to the Gulag, and economist Michael Munger, head of Duke University's political science department and the surprisingly successful Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina.

The quartet spent about 25 minutes talking about the bailouts, how the Cold War still matters, whether libertarian ideas are on the march or in retreat, and much more.

For audio podcast, go here.