Daniel Hoffman – författare

Crane's personal life is related to his work in this evaluation of his sensibility.

The pharmaceutical industry, long thought of as a recession-proof investment, now faces a day of reckoning. The reasons for this impending downfall are not hard to discern. The prices the industry charges for its prescription drugs have escalated at four to five times the cost-of-living increases during the past two decades and have reached a point where 30% of Americans must choose between filling a prescription, paying for housing, and buying food. This has brought about public pressure on governments around the world to control drug prices, yet the world’s twenty largest pharma companies realized 80% of their growth as a result of exorbitant price hikes.Pharma currently enjoys its extraordinary profitability by exploiting the world’s most vulnerable populations. Yet even their ability to increase prices in the face of falling demand does not satisfy their profit demands. The breadth and depth of pharma’s marketing transgressions exceed those of any other industry and have now reached a point where authorities around the world have found it necessary to take legal action against its violations. Drastic change is needed if the pharmaceutical industry can equitably advance the health of the world’s population and regain public esteem. This book illustrates the range and extent of pharma’s violations and addresses the actions that should be implemented in order to make the drug industry a more constructive, less venal part of contemporary society. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students with an interest in the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare management, regulation, and bioethics.

The pharmaceutical industry, long thought of as a recession-proof investment, now faces a day of reckoning. The reasons for this impending downfall are not hard to discern. The prices the industry charges for its prescription drugs have escalated at four to five times the cost-of-living increases during the past two decades and have reached a point where 30% of Americans must choose between filling a prescription, paying for housing, and buying food. This has brought about public pressure on governments around the world to control drug prices, yet the world’s twenty largest pharma companies realized 80% of their growth as a result of exorbitant price hikes.Pharma currently enjoys its extraordinary profitability by exploiting the world’s most vulnerable populations. Yet even their ability to increase prices in the face of falling demand does not satisfy their profit demands. The breadth and depth of pharma’s marketing transgressions exceed those of any other industry and have now reached a point where authorities around the world have found it necessary to take legal action against its violations. Drastic change is needed if the pharmaceutical industry can equitably advance the health of the world’s population and regain public esteem. This book illustrates the range and extent of pharma’s violations and addresses the actions that should be implemented in order to make the drug industry a more constructive, less venal part of contemporary society. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students with an interest in the pharmaceutical industry, healthcare management, regulation, and bioethics.

Reflections on poetry, from the birth of modernism to the present

When Daniel Hoffman published a brief volume of selected poems in England, the Times Literary Supplement praised ""his zestful verbal performance, supple use of rhyme and other sound effects"" that ""make the processes of his writing interesting."" That same vitality and interest inform Hang-Gliding from Helicon, which presents more than forty new poems and a generous selection from six of Hoffman's previous books. Commenting on the most recent of these in the Southern Review, Monroe K. Spears wrote, ""Hoffman's new volume seems to me to establish his claim to the title of major poet."" In the New Republic, Josephine Jacobsen observed: ""Three major strands knit into a strong texture: myth, history, and immediate experience . . . What he once wrote of Robert Graves is true of his own work: both combine 'A Dionysian compulsion to belief with an Apollonian clarity of presentation.'""In the opening piece of this volume, entitled ""The Poem,"" Hoffman writes:True to itself, by what craftAnd strength it has, it has comeAs a sole survivor returns From the steep pass.Carved on memory's staffThe legend is nearly decipherable.It has lived up to its vowsIf it enduresThe journey through the dark placesTo bear witness,Casting its messageIn a sort of singing.Hoffman's poetry is a celebration of life, yet some of his poems have dark implications. ""The City of Satisfactions"" is a journey into the haunted heart of the American dream. ""The Center of Attention"" portrays a suicidal man being taunted by a crowd to jump from a bridge, and ""Witnesses"" explores the aftermath of a car wreck on a desolate stretch of rural highway.Each of Hoffman's poems represents a striking response to the moments of being alive. Hang-Gliding from Helicon affirms the power of poetry to make possible the acceptance and transformation of life. Daniel Hoffman has given us a remarkable statement of his deep poetic faith.

Daniel Hoffman's bold new readings reveal unsuspected dimensions in Faulkner's The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. He shows how these works, often regarded as disunified collections of short stories and novellas, are coherent and successful experiments in novelistic form.These last three novels of Faulkner's great period are striated with folklore and structured with myths. They teem with folk motifs of comic exaggeration, deception, horse-trading, tall-tale humor. Hitherto, critics unversed in folklore have been able to treat these aspects only in generalities. Here, drawing on fieldwork from the Mississippi Writers Project in the 1930s, the author of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe and the influential Form and Fable in America Fiction demonstrates in detail Faulkner's ironical, subversive, and transformative appropriations of folklore plots, characters, comedy, language, and the style of oral tale-telling, setting these in the full complexity of the works they animate.Hoffman, shows, too how in imagining his dynastic novels, Faulkner interprets myth as history, history as myth. He challenges recent deconstructive, post-Marxist and structuralist readings of ""The Bear,"" and demonstrates the necessity on the reader's part for an historical imagination to complement Faulkner's own.Written with verve, Faulkner's Country Matters enriches our reading of Faulkner by presenting his work in its necessary settings of southern history and culture. Faulkner's modernism is restated as a continuance of the great American fiction tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain.

Accepting an award for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Daniel Hoffman wrote, ""Amid private sufferings and outrage at the brutalities of public life, it is gaiety that sustains us, and love, and the imagination's power to create from both deprivation and delight."" This collection embodies those emotions and that imaginative power. Hoffman's verse has always exulted in the resources of language, as sensuous in sound as in response to the natural world. Beyond Silence, to be published on Hoffman's eightieth birthday, presents his shorter poems culled from eight previous collections, plus several new poems. Here, rather than in chronological order, they appear thematically and invite the reader to partake of the pleasures that characterize this distinguished poet's verse: ""clarity, grace where desired, accuracy of visual detail and dialogue, and a formal mastery so deft that playfulness comes easily"" (Fred Chappell).""Arriving at last. It has stumbled across the harsh Stones, the black marshes. True to itself, by what craft And strength it has, it has come As a sole survivor returns. From the steep pass. Carved on memory's staff The legend is nearly decipherable. It has lived up to its vows If it endures The journey through the dark places To bear witness, Casting is message In a sort of singing.-- ""The Poem

For sixty years Daniel Hoffman has drawn on a lifetime of experiences to engage readers with his powerful imagination. The poems in Next to Last Words- illuminated by the poet's unique vision and leavened by touches of humor- continue this tradition. Equally skilled in formal and free verse, Hoffman explores our place in the cosmos, our kinship with nature, the violent world in which we must live, and the intense love and grief common to everyone's life.

Brotherly Love is a long poem that evokes William Penn's luminous vision of America and shows what has become of it as the intractable conflicts of our history-struggles over the land, keeping faith with the Indians, the uses and abuses of power-threaten Penn's ideal.Daniel Hoffman began writing Brotherly Love while he was Poet Laureate of the United States, in 1973-74 (the appointment then called Consultant in Poetry of the Library of Congress). Widely hailed, the book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. It is adapted as the libretto for Ezra Laderman's music in the oratorio Brotherly Love, premiered by the Philadelphia Singers in March 2000.

First published in 1961, this book has survived radical changes in the study of literature. Combining the disciplines of folklore and literary criticism in his readings of works by Irving, Hawthorne, Melville and Mark Twain, Daniel Hoffman demonstrates how these authors transformed materials from both high and popular culture, from their European past and their American present, in works that helped to form American national consciousness. In a new preface, Hoffman describes the evolution of his critical method and suggests the book's value for contemporary readers.