Volume 27, Number 2 · February 21, 1980
Help!
By Jason Epstein
How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years
by Howard J. Ruff
Warner Books, 248 pp., $2.75 (paper)
The Pritikin Program for Diet and Exercise
by Nathan Pritikin, by Patrick M. McGrady Jr.
Grosset and Dunlap, 425 pp., $12.95
The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet
by Herman Tarnower, by Samm Sinclair Baker
Bantam, 225 pp., $2.75 (paper)
As nearly everyone in the world with a dollar to his name must know by now, American currency, like so many other once trusted values, has fallen into a long and agitated decline relative to gold, Swiss francs, bottles of wine, rare books, barrels of oil, old Mickey Mouse toys—nearly anything so long as it doesn't bear the Great Seal of the United States. Howard Ruff, the Mormon author of How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years, thinks that 'much of the American wealth is an illusion which is being secretly gnawed away and much of it will be completely wiped out in the near future.' Ruff's book, published a year or so ago, has been one of the decade's great best sellers—it has sold some 500,000 copies in hard cover and there are now more than a million paperbacks in print, many times more than all the books written in the same period by all the economists in America combined and nearly as many as Dr. Tarnower's no less premonitory The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, last year's number one self-help best seller, which has now been published in a huge paperback edition of 1.75 million copies.
Review, 4030 words
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