Böcker av Richard Hoffman

I was a successful businessman who was always looking for a new adventure to invest in to make my legacy greater. I should have known my next adventure was going beyond anything previously encountered. Despite my disturbing dream, I was not aware of what was to ensue.At the onset, this adventure appeared to be quite lucrative. However, as the adventure progresses, in its unfoldment, it led me to some other unsettling paradigms. I found myself in other time zones and even on other planets.Initially, the pattern of these events seemed obscure. After a few shocking revelations, I realized that there was a purpose to the pattern. The purpose was that of the Ancient Future.

People Once Real redefines elegy. Elegy for the present of our failing democracy, our failing planet, our failing bodies. Elegy for the futures we had imagined would be. Elegy for the past of our forgotten lessons, for our dead that we must praise or forgive to finally let some part of ourselves die. Elegy for the self that ultimately leads Hoffman toward the grace of love that saves us all from emotional oblivion. William Blake meets Walt Whitman in Hoffman, a voice of unparalleled lyricism that is both utterly intimate and specific, as it is wisely oracular and mystical, with a density of breathtaking metaphors that truly elucidate the life and death, death and life of all things that matter in our lives. Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of How To Love a County

Remembering the Alchemists is an intense, passionate, and moving collection of personal essays that never loses sight of the moral issues it raises. At times thoughtful and wise and at other times a cri de c¿ur, it is held together by the experienced voice of an essayist at the top of his game. Richard Hoffman speaks softly, even reverently, in the presence of art and the natural world, but addressing militarism, war, and violence against children, he writes with urgency and earnest questioning. Several of these essays ask how it is that we seem to have given up on ourselves, and what it might take to turn the cascading traumas of history into compassion for one another and lessons for the future. In this award-winning poet's fourth book of prose, sentences can open into reverie or stop you in your tracks. Whether he is writing about a painting, the work of another writer, a tree that grew in front of his boyhood home, the atrocities visited upon children, the superstructure of exploitation and oppression, or the responsibility to be "good ancestor," Hoffman pleads with us to move beyond familiar tropes and assumptions and relinquish a learned despondency that ensures a future of more wars, ongoing injustice, and stifled potential. He transforms personal experience not into "the universal," that categorical abstraction, but into the public, the civic, the ethically useful. These seventeen essays aspire to do more than diagnose our current malaise; they attempt to lift us from it, to clarify our situation, to encourage and inspire. Although Hoffman's candor can at times be shocking, the beauty, intelligence, and bracing clarity of his vision challenges readers to meet the demands of our historical moment with confidence. Insisting that no conclusions are foregone, Remembering the Alchemists is ultimately a book about what it means to hope, to have faith, to see clearly and still insist on joy.

An acclaimed author reflects on his upbringing in a postWorld War II blue-collar family and comes to terms with the racism, sexism, and other toxic values he inherited.Finalist for the 2014 New England Book Award in Non-Fiction Richard Hoffman sometimes felt as though he had two fathers: the real one who raised him and an imaginary version, one he talked to on the phone, and one he talked to in his head. Although Hoffman was always close to the man, his father remained a mystery, shrouded in a perplexing mix of tenderness and rage. When his father receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, Hoffman confronts the depths and limitations of their lifelong struggle to know each other, weighing their differences and coming to understand that their yearning and puzzlement was mutual. With familial relationships at its center, Love & Fury draws connections between past and present, from the author's grandfather, a ';breaker boy' sent down into the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania at the age of ten, to his young grandson, whose father is among the estimated one million young black men incarcerated today. In a critique of culture and of self, Hoffman grapples with the way we have absorbed and incorporated the compelling imagery of post WWII America and its values, especially regarding class, war, women, race, masculinity, violence, divinity, and wealth. A masterful memoirist, Hoffman writes not only to tell a gripping story but also to understand, through his family, the social and ethical contours of American life. At the book's core are the author's questions about boyhood, fatherhood, and grandfatherhood, and about the changing meaning of what it means to be a good man in America, now and into the future.

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