Product Description
" A major work, a record of our era," wrote Maxine Kumin in awarding the Paterson Poetry Prize to Hang-Gliding from Helicon, Daniel Hoffman's selected poems a dozen years ago.Of Darkening Water, his first collection since then, Fred Chappell observes, "These poems have all the poet's familiar virtues-clarity, grace where desired, accuracy of detail and of dialogue, and a formal mastery so deft that playfulness comes easily.Hoffman's dominant theme lies in the contrast (and often the necessary balance) between the primal, ancient, legendary strains of our culture and the new-fangled, distracting, but genuine imperatives of contemporaneity.Hoffman uses older forms and traditions to make something new and durable."

The range of Hoffman's sensibility includes the primordial sludge from which life emerged and the coin-filled fountain of a suburban shopping mall, an enduring New England garden and the dancing woman in an ancient cave.His luminous poems create memorable characters, exploring man's relationship to nature and to time.Seemingly effortless juxtapositions create rewarding surprises.

This refined collection by one of our finest poets reverberates with intelligence, close observation, and a deep respect for the possibilities of language.It is a treasure for Hoffman's many longtime readers as well as for those discovering his work for the first time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent return to the field.
Daniel Hoffman, Darkening Water (Louisiana State University Press, 2002)

Daniel Hoffman has quietly become one of the giants of American verse over the past few decades. I hadn't picked up one of his books since Middens of the Tribe, which I read at least ten years ago (and it had been sitting on my shelf for quite a while before that). I'm quite happy to have rediscovered him.

Hoffman creates startlingly real characters for poetry, which usually doesn't work with characters at all, or gives them secondary significance to image and language. Hoffman does so not by elevating the characters over those two important pieces of the poetic puzzle, but making them of equal weight. He does so without a shred of overbearing message, which is what makes these poems so different than your average fare. As well, Hoffman is an accomplished writer in rhyme and traditional forms; Darkening Water often feels like reading a manuscript produced during the waning years of popular traditional verse, but with a completely modern sensibility. The only comparison I can even begin to see is to John Hollander, but Hoffman seems to have his feet farther on the ground than does Hollander.

Fine stuff, demanding careful reading and much thought. Well worth it. *** ½

Time Made Visible in a Dazzling Way
This is a wonderful collection of poems of great variety, dexterity and eloquence.Many themes are present, from the evolutionary insights of "Evidence," which vividly evoke the sensory experience of our Neanderthal ancestors or earlier ones, resurrecting prehistoric remains into the immediacy of flesh and firelight, to subtle evocations of immortality in simple labor (and, by implication, art) in "A Pile of Rocks."From the poignant and beautifully imaged sonnet on the fragility of memory in an academic - or any other - setting, "Philosophy," to the evocative lament of time's passage in "Emblems," to the incandescent, bird-inspired energy of "Called Back," with its "silky wash of dots banding the heavens...Time made visible as space...the oldest light."
The depth of the finest poems in this volume is startling and profound.Phrases triumph in unexpected and inspired ways, even as the subject, form and scope of individual poems keep the reader invigorated, surprises on every page as tantalizing in their rhythms as the turbulent surf beautifully photographed on the cover.I heartily recommend this volume, whether as an introduction to, or for continued appreciation of, the work of one of our greatest poets. ... Read more

Product Description
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 vowsIf it endures
The journey through the dark places
To bear witness,
Casting is message
In a sort of singing.

-"The Poem" ... Read more

Product Description
A reference guide developed to help the urologist make the most of radiology in the practice. It aims to help interpret imaging studies for all the modalities in use when diagnosing common disorders of the genitourinary tract. More than 300 reproduced images demonstrate all the applicable imaging modalities, including radiography, CT, MRI and ultrasound. ... Read more

Product Description
This study explores each facet of Elaine Pagels' theory regarding a positive correlation between the active female deities of Gnostic cosmologies and the actual status of women in Gnostic groups in the 2nd and early-3rd centuries. The work expands on earlier studies that noted the presence of many secondary, inferior, or otherwise negative female images in Gnostic thought, and refutes the theory that women in early orthodox Christian groups had low status in relation to women in Gnosticism, primarily by considering the writings of Irenaeus and Tertullian. Daniel Hoffman seeks to demonstrate that a comprehensive understanding of their views of women do not allow for the assumption that they distorted the truly negative position of women in some Gnostic groups. Finally, the study provides a balanced contribution to the late-20th-century debate about gender imagery for God. ... Read more

Product Description
in "Form and Fable in American Fiction," Daniel Hoffman demonstrated the relationship between the literary imagination in America and our myths, fables, and folktales. Reasserting and deepening the thesis of that study in "Faulkner's Country Matters," Hoffman provides rich readings of "The Unvanquished," "The Hamlet," and "Go Down, Moses," and at the same time offers a moving, often profound meditation on the American sense of history as myth and myth as history. Appearing at a moment when Faulker studies are dominated by a rage for theorizing about literature, Hoffman's new book returns us to the actual source of the author's imagination. ... Read more

Product Description
Makes You Stop and Think is a collection written over fifty years, from the accomplished and renowned poet Daniel Hoffman."The sonnet… is a sacred / vessel, it takes a civilization / to conceive its shape or know / its uses," the poet Louise Bogan told "a crowd of bearded youths" and "rumpled girls." Hoffman's harvest of half a century's sonnets shows the richness and power of their form. These poems revel in exploring memory and feeling:

      For reality is vintage and delicious
      Especially when you taste it while it brews
      Because it comes as love comes, heart-skip sudden,
      Yet long as a lifetime in a once past wishes,
      A gift you couldn't have the wit to choose. ... Read more

Product Description
Hoffman traces the origins of executive secrecy and the legal and political efforts to control it since the Federalist era, focusing on the Jay Treaty Struggle, the XYZ Affair and the 1798 Sedition Act. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Constitutional Scruples
This obscure item is a lost classic of early American political history, and is especially valuable for researchers interested in the origins of America's traditions of government transparency and open access to information. As Hoffman found, those "traditions" are not so traditional after all. Despite the lauded theoretical ideals of the Founding Fathers, the good or evil of government secrecy was an open question that has never been fully resolved. After an in-depth look at the surprisingly limited influence of transparency theory on the Constitutional Convention, much of this book covers a distressing pattern of government secrecy, and nasty political battles against it, during the Washington and Adams administrations. Via impeccable historical research and reviews of period sources, Hoffman finds that there has never been unassailable transparency in American government, allowing our leaders to fall into periodic fits of obfuscation and persecution ranging from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the Watergate debacle. (The book is from 1981, but the basic challenges are still with us.)

Of course, America is blessed with one of the world's strongest traditions of transparency in government. But here Hoffman shows that watchdogs, journalists, and interested citizens cannot rest on tradition alone, and the access we have now could easily slip away. [~doomsdayer520~] ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Browse this book
I want to read some pages of this book every day,since I am very busy every day.

Browse this book
I want to read some pages of this book every day,since I am very busy every day. ... Read more

Product Description
(Pearson Education) A collection of 33 influential papers on the foundation of modern software theory and practice and various areas of software engineering, by David L/ Parnas. Provides historical content for each paper, and explains topics such as relational and tabular documentation and the status of software engineering. DLC: Computer software. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (12)

Must Reading For Every Software Engineer
Parnas is one of the giants of the early days of software engineering and these papers are truly fundamental to understanding the discipline.

If you have not been exposed to Parnas' work, then this book provides a collection of the essential writings of this seminal author. My personal favorite, which you should read if you are interested in software process improvement, is "A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It."

While its definitely not easy reading, it is worthwhile and highly recommended for every individual that aspires to being a software engineer.

An insight to the software fundamentals
This book is not typical for software literature. An anthology of papers published since 1970s by one of the most influential researchers in software engineering - David Lorge Parnas. Here is a quote from the editors:

---QUOTE---
This book is our attempt to provide a view of the work of one of the grandmasters of our field, highlighting the fundamental ideas that he and his colleagues invented and expounded. We hope to provide the reference for those who teach and those who do, giving them both an historical record, a clear explanation of fundamental ideas that will help them in their work...
---/QUOTE---

Although loosely categorized under 4 parts - Description and specification, Software design, Concurrency and scheduling and Commentary, the papers are effectively assorted. The most influential papers seem to appear in the book, but there also are others that are of interest only with respect to the way the author writes, not with the discussed matter.

To me, the most valuable papers fell into just two categories. First, the ones that I could apply with my practical work (for those who do). Not as a hands-on manual of course, but as the original source of the mechanisms we now have and the goals originally intended. These were papers about modularization, interfaces, abstract data types, handling errors, software "aging" etc. Second were the social and philosophical kind of papers on engineering aspects of software development, professional responsibility and ethics, teaching programming etc (for those who teach).

There also were many papers that I found useless. They either discuss a specific algorithm, or have too much mathematical notation and not enough readable outcome. Mathematical rigor, that I do respect, but having presented a software practitioner with a dense mathematical proof is likely to miss the point. I don't need the proof and I won't be checking it for correctness. I need the result and I will trust it. The author himself writes in one of the papers:

---QUOTE---
Computer professionals do not read our literature because it does not help them to do their job better. These papers may be very good papers, they may have influenced other researchers, but they have not significantly changed the way that programs are written.
---/QUOTE---

Many times I couldn't even read half a page without having my mind drifting away, as the simple idea put in a single sentence brought up a world of thoughts. At that times I had to close the book and stare outside trying to sort out my own thoughts provoked with what I've just read. Many of the things about which Parnas wrote now appear under different names, and they even look and behave slightly different from how he envisioned but it is nevertheless the original source and it is a magnificent feeling to read it.

The book is a great experience to read, but I won't be recommending it to you. You'll know by yourself when you want it.

Good design book
This book is a must read for anyone taking a course in software design, or software engineers who are interested to design better software systems. The book is not for casual reading, each research paper requires alot of effort from the reader, to understand and appreciate the depth covered in these papers. It is amazing to find Parnas papers on software engineering, has been tested by time, and has remained undisputed for the last 4 decades. I liked the following papers, criteria used for decomposing system into modules (information hiding), hierarchical software structures, design for ease of extension, program families, and software aging.

Well-Organized Review, Insightful Content.
I consider this book on two levels:
1. How well does it capture and present the important contributions Parnas has made to the Software Engineering discipline?
2. Is the content (i.e. Parnas' papers) useful?
---

This book does a beautiful job of collecting and organizing Parnas' papers.Each paper is preceeded by an introduction from a peer or other recognized prominent computer scientist.Almost all of these introductions are insightful in themselves: they help create a context for the essay which made it easier for me to fill in the gaps.Almost all of the contributors' writting styles are lucid and easy to read.I found reading through this book quite enjoyable.

Parnas' contributions are critical, no doubt.The concept of Information Hiding as a criteria for modular decomposition really helped form modern "object-oriented" thinking.It seems to me that returning to the first well-formed idea can often grant insights into how to be more effective with its offspring.Indeed, Chapter 7 in this text is essentially a primer on how to think in object-oriented terms.

You'll not find a passage that reads, "now here's an example of that in Java/C#/C++"But that's the blessing: Parnas communicates the essence of the principles that yield quality software engineering without getting lost in unnecessary details.The fact that some of these papers were written 30 years ago helps bring home the fact that novel ideas are rare.

One aspect of 30 year-old writtings that may be a stumbling block for similarly aged programmers is that these works live in an iron world: where programs lived very close to their hardware.Parnas uses phrases like "4 bytes packed in a word" and "core" that seem primal (not to say that some folks aren't concerned with word-sizes and which endian, just that the overall percentage is much lower).For some, this may seem to be a waste of time to try to understand.I encourage the reader to ferret out the bigger message...the more abstract picture of principles that guide one to conceive, organize, implement and document quality software.

If you are a journeyman programmer looking for the original latin, enjoy this well-polished collection for yourself.

Still relevant in the world of Software Engineering
Anyone who considers themself a Java developer should know who Dave Parnas is. Without the insight of Dave Parnas in the 60s and 70s there would be no such thing as the Java programming language. Ever heard of information hiding (the basis for all Object Oriented programming)? Yeah, Parnas came up with that. Exception Handling? That's him too. Interfaces? Parnas. (Get the idea?)

This book reprints 33 of Parnas' most influential papers. Each paper is started off with an introduction from one of Parnas' peers (like Barry Boehm), giving the paper a connection to the modern state of Software Engineering, and trying to give the reader an understanding of just how seminal the particular paper was to the world of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

I believe you become a much better programmer if you understand where things come from. Once you understand how things were before "Information Hiding" came about, you get a better appreciation for why its such a necessary and important practice. You'll become a better programmer because you're more aware of what would happen if you didn't have exception handling. And you'll be come a better writer when you understand why buzzwords can be so dangerous in technical papers.

Dave Parnas has been a huge influence over the world of Software Engineering. Everyone should have the chance to read his work. ... Read more

Product Description
Includes DVD: video slideshows "Heretical Visionary Sacraments amongst the Ecclesiastical Elite" and "Melusina of Plaincourault"
It was mainly only the European urban centers that converted to Christianity, and often more for political or commercial interests,than as a matter of faith. The old religions persisted in the villages or pagani, from which the term Paganism arose. The Christians built their sanctuaries upon the pagan sites, expropriating their numinous past, assimilating the symbolism of the former deities, and commonly incorporating the actual architectural remnants. The wisdom of those deposed gods and their rites persisted in less objectionable forms - disguised to delude the censors - as country festivals and quaint tales often about the fairy folk, who coexisted with this world and could be accessed by magical procedures that perpetuated half-remembered methods of authentic ancient shamanism.

Such shamanism always involved pharmaceutical expertise. Mircea Eliade was mistaken in concluding that drugs were characteristic only of the late and decadent stages of a religion. Rock paintings of the greatest antiquity and his own abundant citations indicate that, instead, a pharmacological Eucharist was the norm; and Eliade was himself about to reverse his stance shortly before his death.

Encoded in tales seemingly as simple as Snow White with her poisoned red and white apple are themes traceable back to the great epics of Homer and the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh. These patterns of shamanic empowerment lurk also in the histories of the leading families of Europe, who could not completely divest themselves of the former religious basis for their right to rule, but instead they embraced, Christianized, and buried it in sanctified graves, as was the case with the great fairy Melusina, whose eighth abominable son, called Horrible, was murdered.A number of churches involved in the Albigensian heresy claim his body was laid to rest beneath them. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A thorough investigation of European fairy tales reveals a rich and enchanting psychedelic lore.
The Hidden World, Survival of Pagan Shamanic Themes in European Fairytales
By Carl A.P. Ruck, Blaise Daniel Staples, José Alfredo Gonzalez Celdrán, and Mark Alwin Hoffman. Carolina Academic Press, 2007.


A thorough investigation of European fairy tales reveals a rich and enchanting psychedelic lore.

In this academic masterpiece, Professor Carl Ruck and his band of sleuthers (Prof. José Gonzalez, Dr. Blaise Staples and Mark Hoffman) uncover the facts regarding whether or not entheogenic drug use was prominent throughout European fairytales, legends and folklore, teasing out the intricate clues in their most thorough investigation on this topic to date.

By comparing these ancient stories and untangling the threads that seem unrelated in their weaves, we come to see that the mysteries of the entheogenic rites were not lost to the Europeans, and that European folklore is rich with evidence that should make anyone who cares to investigate the many thorough citations a believer without a doubt.

In 1968 Gordon Wasson published Soma in which he argued that the Hindu Soma of the Rig Vedas was the Amanita muscaria or fly-agaric mushroom. Wasson opted to argue in this and subsequent publications that he could find no evidence of mushroom use in European ancestry. As he states on page 176: "I shall begin by saying where in Europe's past I have not found the cult of the sacred mushroom." He then goes on to discuss witchcraft, the druids and berserkers.

But from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to the werewolves and the mysteries of lycanthropy, to vampires, to King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, to the berserkers and many others, by following the threads of these stories Ruck and crew find shamanic stories embedded throughout European folklore stemming from Druidic, Mithraic, Manichaean and Catharic histories, right into modern-day Christianity.

This book is a linguistic, as much as historical and mythological investigation of religious and folkloric themes. It's a deep and powerful book. It's one of those books I would happily read several times over to discover what previous reads missed.

As someone who has read many, if not most, of their citations, I can attest to the thoroughness of their investigation. I am genuinely impressed by the quality of this presentation - the eloquence of which they lay on the late Dr. Staples. But it is clear that in this book they've all gone out of their way to present a thorough and well argued masterpiece.

Charting new territory

The Hidden World as a title does not refer to the theme of occult secret societies and mystery schools (like Eleusis) and the suppression of pagan rites in the Pharmacratic Inquisition, but to the hidden world of the fairies, the gnomes and dwarves - the hidden world that lies just beyond our normal senses. It is important that people understand this while reading this book. I should make clear that the book does discuss those themes. However, it is important to understand the proper context of the hidden world on which the authors are focused.

This book should be recognized as one of the best pieces on entheogenic scholarship to date. It is by far, in my opinion, the authors' best work. The writing pose, the depth of the study, the quality and originality of research all weigh heavily in my evaluation; and I'm not one who has shied away from being critical of these authors in the past.

Weaknesses in the book, two of which should have been properly addressed by the publisher but were not, include: A) lack of illustrations. It is grueling to have to look up the illustrations one by one (even if I already had many of them). This book was clearly written with the intention of illustrations being included, but for some reason, their publisher did not include them. For the price of the book, the publisher could have easily done so. Thankfully the included DVD contains wonderful illustrations for the section Heretical Visionary Sacraments (chapter 2). B) There is no standard bibliography, which I find a great hindrance to researching their citations. You have to go to the footnotes of each page to find the citation there, rather than a simple bibliography at the back of the book. C) Lastly, this book discusses at length the many stories of Amanita muscaria and the shamanic tradition of urine consumption. But it should be noted that other mushrooms (psilocybe), and other entheogens, can also be recycled. A more encompassing investigation with this inclusion might yield some fantastic information and is something that deserves focus.

A 5 star read. A must have for any researcher of mythology, folklore, religion and entheogens.

Entertaining, but are mushrooms really the key to *everything*?
This book was passed on to me by a friend who knows I have interest in the now largely-ignored issue of survivals in folklore and in religious studies (my doctoral work was in this area). The premise is interesting enough: that folkloric materials contain remnants of shamanic ritual. Given the work done on figures such as the Hungarian táltos, there is ample reason to accept this general premise.

Unfortunately, Ruck's book is not about the survival of shamanic traces in fairytales. Rather (as anyone familiar with Ruck's writing, which I was not before reading this book, would have known), it's all about the 'shrooms dude. No occurrence of a red and white color scheme is too small, no bumpy surface too insignificant, no apparent change in mental state too trivial to be proof that lurking just beneath the surface of these tales is a cult of Amanita muscaria (fly agaric) eaters that seem to transcend time and space to be wherever Ruck needs them.

If Ruck is right, then he has the key to understanding the whole of human history from (I'm not joking) the lotophagi of the Odyssey to Super Mario Brothers. Of course, when a claim is too much to be believed (such as his statement that it is well known that Through The Looking Glass is a text about mushrooms) there are footnotes to other writings by Ruck or his coauthors to back it up. It's self-referential scholarship at its best! Everything is meticulously documented, but nothing seems to escape the gravitational pull of Ruck's Big Idea. And just when you think that there can't be a more outrageous claim about the role of mushrooms in human society, another one comes along that tops the last one.

Ultimately, I'm afraid, the issue isn't one of scholarship, but rather one of religion. Even Ruck's preferred term for psychedelics, "entheogens" (that which brings the god within), is an attempt to invest these things with not even quasi-religious authority. (While one could argue that entheogen is a more respectful and less loaded term than psychedelic with its associations with 60s drug counter-culture, Ruck seems to want the reader to take the theos component of entheogen literally.) Alas, Ruck's hypothesis cannot be falsified by the evidence, so it also cannot be tested or verified (a point he basically concedes at various points when he says that those looking for "proof" will miss the point). If you believe that the shrooms were everywhere, it all makes sense. If you're a bit skeptical, it's one wild ride of conjecture and outrageous speculation. While it is possible that Ruck is right and mushrooms (the consumption of which he basically equates with shamanism) were everywhere from Alice in Wonderland to the Christian Eucharist to Hindu enlightenment, I don't have the eye of faith needed to see it and I certainly don't see it as being so basic and fundamental and pervasive as Ruck and his colleagues do.

I'd give this one star for the scholarship, but for sheer entertainment value it's got two stars. If you like Graham Hancock or Erik von Däniken as spinners of great yarns, Ruck is up there with them (although nothing here is quite so, umm, exciting as Hancock's tales of spending the night among the pyramids and finding out some things he just can't tell the readers yet...)

There is credible scholarship out there about survivals and about shamanism, but this isn't it. I'm sure that Ruck would object that I've just bought into the whole mindset that suppresses the truth, but all this points to the fact that for Ruck et al. the mushrooms are an article of faith, something that is there before and after all proof or lack thereof. ... Read more

Product Description
Word count: 2322. ... Read more