Word: langer
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Friedman is in a shrinking minority, however. Judith Langer, whose New York City marketing research firm has studied attitudes toward energetic exercisers, reports, "A few years ago, they may have seemed strange. Now they're respected." Dr. Ronald Mackenzie, medical director for the National Athletic Health Institute in Inglewood, Calif., is also sanguine. He contends that 10% of Americans are highly motivated and exercise consistently. Another 10% refuse to change their sedentary ways. Then there is the vast majority who are trying to improve their health habits but do not feel they are very successful. But, says Mackenzie, "these people...
NONFICTION: Bloods, Wallace Terry The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-1944, Lucjan Dobroszycki, Editor ∙ The Death Merchant, Joseph C. Goulden ∙ Josephine Herbst, Elinor Langer ∙ The Weaker Vessel, Antonia Fraser Writers at Work, George Plimpton, Editor
...Langer's one-page account of the couple's decisive journey to the U.S.S.R. blandly echoes the letters Herbst was writing home at the time. Russians in the street look "vital and alert." The workers' kitchens are "so shining." This was the year of the great famine, a direct result of Stalin's enforced collectivization. Though Herbst may have been shielded from the grislier effects of the mass starvation that cost 6 million peasant lives, she could not have failed to see what other travelers were reporting: hordes of hollow-eyed families begging at every railway...
Thirty-eight years later Herbst published a brief reminiscence of the trip that should have prodded Langer, usually an indefatigable researcher, into inquiring about conditions in the U.S.S.R. at the time of the visit. Herbst wrote that she had failed to ask about the collectivization that had uprooted "flocks of human beings, to starve or die." Instead, not a word about the famine appears in Langer's book...
...novelist who offers advice on how to lie as effectively in life as in fiction is likely to have trouble writing anything honest, especially memoirs. For the last 15 years of her life, Herbst vainly attempted to compose hers. But as Langer notes, to be straight with herself and others, the writer "would have had to remove the veil over some very sorrowful private and political moments." Langer has gingerly removed that veil. In the process, she has exposed more than she wanted to and more than Herbst's loving friends could ever have supposed. -By Patricia Blake