Word: hoffmann
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When the tranquilizer Valium became the most frequently prescribed drug of the stressed-out 1970s, F. Hoffmann-La Roche reached the peak of good health. Thanks largely to Valium and its sister sedative, Librium, the Swiss-based Hoffmann-La Roche became the No. 1 maker of prescription pharmaceuticals and one of the most profitable companies on earth. But lulled by the success of Valium, whose U.S. patent expired four years ago, the company failed to keep pace in the '80s with such aggressive rivals as U.S.-based Merck and Swiss neighbors Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy. Symbolic of Hoffmann-La Roche...
...that unwieldy price is about to go the way of the apothecary jar. Hoffmann-La Roche last week announced that it plans to restructure its capital by declaring a 50-for-1 stock split. The move will reduce the value of the 16,000 voting bearer shares to about $3,300 each. The overhaul will also cut the price of Hoffmann-La Roche's 61,440 shares of nonvoting dividend-rights certificates, which the company calls Genussscheine or "joy certificates," from about $95,000 to $1,900 and eliminate a cheaper class of stock that was nicknamed Baby Roche...
...capital structure will bolster a company war chest that already holds $4 billion in cash. The money will come in handy at a time when international pharmaceutical giants are scrambling to join forces. Hoffmann-La Roche, whose strong suit is prescription products, still smarts from its failure last year to acquire New York City-based Sterling Drug, the maker of Bayer aspirin, Phillips milk of magnesia and other popular over-the-counter brands. Sterling spurned the Hoffmann-La Roche offer and sold out to Eastman Kodak instead. "We wanted primarily to establish ourselves in the American over-the-counter market...
...fortune left by the late, eccentric Francis Cornish. Meeting in Toronto, the benefactor's nephew Arthur and the four other board members of the Cornish Foundation consider an offbeat project. A graduate student named Hulda Schnakenburg wants to earn her Ph.D. in music by finishing an opera that E.T.A. Hoffmann left incomplete at the time of his death in 1822. Not only does the foundation agree to underwrite Hulda's expenses, but it also coughs up the funds for a full-scale production of the final product. As soon as feasible, Arthur of Britain, or The Magnanimous Cuckold, will...
That last touch -- the voice from Limbo -- is Davies' only deviation from strict narrative plausibility, and it is a minor one at that. Hoffmann cannot intercede in the proceedings; he is just another spectator along with the readers. Davies does not need spooks or disembodied souls to demonstrate that even the most mundane, realistic events can be steeped in magic. Simon Darcourt, an Anglican clergyman, a professor of Greek and the secretary of the Cornish Foundation, believes "that everybody had a personal myth," that people's lives unfold in accordance with invisible but implacable patterns. Despite his extensive education, Darcourt...