Objectively Speaking

Readers and students of Ayn Rand will value seeing in this collection of interviews how Ayn Rand applied her philosophy and moral principles to the issues of the day. Objectively Speaking includes half a century of print and broadcast interviews drawn from the Ayn Rand Archives. The thirty-two interviews in this collection, edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz, include print interviews from the 1930s and edited transcripts of radio and television interviews from the 1940s through 1981. Selections are included from a remarkable series of radio broadcasts over a four-year period (1962-1966) on Columbia University's station WKCR in New York City and syndicated throughout the United States and Canada. Ayn Rand's unusual and strikingly original insights on a vast range of topics are captured by prominent interviewers in the history of American television broadcasting, such as Johnny Carson, Edwin Newman, Mike Wallace, and Louis Rukeyser. The collection concludes with an interview of Dr. Leonard Peikoff on his radio program in 1999, recalling his 30-year personal and professional association with Ayn Rand and discussing her unique intellectual and literary achievements. Ayn Rand is the best-selling author of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Anthem, and We the Living. Fifty years or more after publication, sales of these novels continue to increase.

Whatever you asked her—within the fields she knew—she had not only an answer, but an encyclopedia of knowledge in her mind backing her answer up with identifications, integrations, connections, illustrations. Suppose you asked her what she thought of a movie she'd just seen. By the time she finished her answer, it was as if you had taken an entire course in esthetics, movie-making, dialogue construction, philosophy and art., Readers will find this a particularly topical review of Rand's highly individualistic philosophy., A friendly forum, edited by a pair of Rand partisans. ...A resource for Rand completists...a careful reader could glean the essence of Objectivism from what appears here., But she would project the power of being able to cope with anything, of being able to answer anything and solve anything. In her presence, you had to feel—at least, I felt—there is hope, there is a future, justice will triumph. That sense just radiated out of her, and made it easier to leave on a better note, and to live more fully and happily.

Marlene Podritske is a freelance editor, writer, and designer. Peter Schwartz is author of The Foreign Policy of Self-Interest: A Moral Ideal for America and editor of Ayn Rand's Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.