4 comments about Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations (6th Edition).

1. This textbook is helpful in terms of the basic principles in the the field of nonverbal, human communication. The chapters are divided into easy to understand categories of body language such as physical appearance, eye behavior, touch, space and territory etc. Subsequent chapters involve a more quantitative, holistic, and practical approach such chapters devoted to: female-male, supervisor-subordinate, intercultural nonverbal relationships. The research presented is also current.



2. This textbook is helpful in terms of basic principles in the the field of nonverbal, human communication. The chapters are divided into easy to understand categories of body language such as physical appearance, eye behavior, touch, space and territory etc. Subsequent chapters involve a more quantitative, holistic, and practical approach such chapters devoted to: female-male, supervisor-subordinate, intercultural nonverbal relationships. The research presented is also current.



3. This book provides a decent overview. It refuted some of the more prevalent myths about "body language". However, the bang was simply not worth the buck. The paperback edition is published with what can only be surmised to be photographs of the authors' home and students as illustrations and examples. This book is a little too home-grown.



4. This book provides a decent overview. It refuted some of the more prevalent myths about "body language". However, the bang was simply not worth the buck. The paperback edition is published with what can only be surmised to be photographs of the authors' home and students as illustrations and examples. This book is a little too home-grown.

3 comments about Failure-Free Activities for the Alzheimer's Patient: A Guidebook for Caregivers.

1. "What kind of activities are there for the Alzheimer's patient?" is a question that comes up often. I always recommend this book. Carmel describes all kind of activities: music, exercise, food preparation, crafts, gardening, solo activities, family games, and reminiscence. I especially like the chapter on reminiscence--with the life collage, memory book, memory box, and more. Activities are very important, as is explained in this book's introdution: "The more involved patients remain with the world around them, the more resourceful they become at finding ways to keep that world for slipping away."



2. Thanks to this book, I have found dozens of creative ways to keep my mother (who is in the middle stages of Alzheimer's) involved and free from boredom. The activity ideas we found in this wonderful little book have improved my mother's quality of life tremendously and have made caring for her a lot easier and more enjoyable.



3. This excellent book provides dozens of ideas for keeping the person with Alzheimer's involved and stimulated. The focus is on using activities such as music, exercise and reminiscing to enhance quality of life. Family and professional caregivers can use these activities and many of the ideas outlined truly work wonders. This is undoubtedly the most useful book available on using activities with people with Alzheimer's.

4 comments about Hairspray: The Roots.

1. I was intorduced to this musical in the Fall of 2006, well after the hoop-la surrounding the original cast. I bought this book and was very happy with the care and detail that went into its production. WHile it focuses on the original cast, any true fan of this show will be amazingly happy to see behind-the-scenes of the show, hear thoughts from the creators and original stars and see pictures, pictures, and more pictures of the Nicest Kids in Town and those close to them!



2. Okay I love this book alot. It includes almost if not the entire show but I think its ridiculous how much they are charging. I bought it for literally $1.07 at the Dollar Tree, so I bought 3 for family and friends.
   But I just wanted to say that the book is awesome. If you get the book, you won't regret it. It has so many pictures and little extras so go to the dollar tree and buy it!



3. I have loved this show since I first listenend to the recording, and after seeing the show I think I may be obsessed with it. The show is completely fun and entertaining and this book does a good job at capturing the spirit and energy of the show. I particularly like all the full color photos and candids of the cast offstage as well as the "diary" entries from Marisa Jaret Winokur (Tracy) and Harvey Firestein (Edna). This book is worth it!



4. If you're a fan of the Broadway musical Hairspray, then you need this book. It's really that simple. In addition to a detailed history of the show, tons of photos, insider information, detailed analyses of previous versions of the script and the script that was eventually used, and even more information in general than you could possibly digest in one (or even two) readings, it's full of exactly the same kind of wacky, irreverant style and humor that's found in the show and that's helped to make it such a big success on Broadway. Hairspray: The Roots is hip, hilarious, colorful, and, in its own way, very musical.

   Only one thing prevents the book from being the perfect example of its kind and earning a five star rating: it does not preserve the entire complete libretto of the show, choosing instead to eliminate the dialogue in places and replace it with scene descriptions. While this is unthinkable and incomprehensible given the sheer amount of information that was included and the great care that has been put into every other element of it, in the end, this particular frustration remains minor. If you can live with that, you'll find no other flaw in this remarkable, must-own volume.

1 comments about Telling Tales and Other New One-Act Plays.

1. This compilation was very interesting. It lacked a little in the plays with many characters. If you are looking for a book of one acts to use for directing experience or for intermediate acting experience, then I highly recomend this book.

5 comments about Cymbeline (Folger Shakespeare Library).

1. Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's least performed and least read plays. You do not stumble on it, you work your way through Shakespeare's opus and finally get there. The historical context is the war between Britain and the Roman Empire, and the action is hot and heavy, requiring five acts and twenty-seven scenes. Perhaps it is this complexity of plot that retarded Shakespeare's character development. Fewer lines have entered our lexicon from this play than most. Two exceptions are "the tongue is sharper than the sword," and to have "a bellyful of fighting." It is an excellent tragedy, however, combining elements of King Lear and elements of Othello. In its mystic elements it also resembles The Tempest.
   
   The core of the plot is the bet between Posthumous, the king's son, and Iachimo, who wagers ten thousand ducats that he can seduce Posthumous' wife, Imogen. Posthumous, in turn, wagers a ring that Imogen has given him that Iachimo will not succeed. Initially, we amused by the idea, but upon further reflection, it is clear that the gambit cannot have a happy ending. Either the seduction is successful, breaking up the marriage, or it isn't, in which case Iachimo will certainly claim that he has secuced Imogen, simply to win the ring. In the process he sets himself the Iago-like task of converting love to hate.
   
   The play is also full of classic Shakespearean gadgetry, including a potion that causes a trance resembling death, mystical soothsayers, the intervention of gods, women disguised as men, and a historical tableau which would have been familiar to Shakespeare's audience. It is a quintessential Shakespearean play, comprising nearly all of the classical elements of tragedy. If the plot could have been pruned, and the characters given more of the dimensionality that we expect from Shakespeare, Cymbeline would stand on a higher pedestal.
   
   The Folger Shakespeare Library's annotated edition is excellent. It provides just the right notation on the page facing the text, and can be studied or ignored to suit the reader's purpose.



2. Cymbeline was a British king in Roman times ( Augustus Caesar's time).
   Devices used in the Play:
   1) a woman plays a man/ boy role ( several of his plays : As You Like it,
   Twelfth Night))
   2) a deception by a villain to lie the virtue of a Lady ( Much Ado about
   Nothing)
   3) Princes kidnapped and brought up as common men ( I don't know if he
   uses this in other plays)
   4) poison that causes a coma ( Romeo and Juliet)
   5) a Prince who is a vile fool ( used in his historical plays)
   6) a Queen who is a plotter and evil ( Macbeth)
   7) a Prince who kills another Prince and it redeemed by his hidden
   identity
   8) a Prince sentenced to hang by mistake
   9) a King who condemns his daughter wrongly ( King Lear)
   One wonders how much of this is historical fact and how much pure fiction.
   With all this scheming in the plot , it should be a very successful
   play.
   It is a total flop!
   What it comes out is seeming unreal and contrived.
   You get that happy ending feel that is so much in his comedies
   but it has a very false feeling to it.
   That's probably why Cymbeline isn't performed much.
   If he hadn't gone for all these at once it might have worked, but the
   result is that you see the playwright as ....
   If anyone wants to take the air out of a Shakespeare pedant,
   this is the play to do it with! He makes Shaw and Eugene O'neil l
   look good. He even make Rogers and Hammerstein and Gilbert and
   Sullivan look better, ha, ha...
   This play is not Shakespeare's finest hour!



3. "Cymbeline" is my favourite Shakespeare play. It's also probably his loopiest. It has three plots, managing to drag in a banishment, a murder, a wicked queen, a moment of almost sheer pornography, a full-on battle between the Romans and the British, a spunky heroine, her jealous but not-really-all-that-bad husband, some fantastic poetry and Jupiter himself descending out of heaven on an eagle to tell the husband to pull his finger out and get looking for his wife. Finally, just when your head is spinning with all the cross-purposes and dangling resolutions, Shakespeare pulls it all together with shameless neatness and everybody lives happily ever after. Except for the wicked queen, and her son, who had his head cut off in Act 4.

   "Cymbeline" is, then, completely nuts, but it manages also to be very moving. Quentin Tarantino once described his method as "placing genre characters in real-life situations" - Shakespeare pulls off the far more rewarding trick of placing realistic characters in genre situations. Kicking off with one of the most brazen bits of expository dialogue he ever created, not even bothering to give the two lords who have to explain the back story an ounce of personality, Shakespeare quickly recovers full control and races through his long, complex and deeply implausible narrative at a headlong pace. The play is outrageously theatrical, and yet intensely observed. Imogen's reaction on reading her husband's false accusation of her infidelity is a riveting mixture of hurt and anger; she goes through as much tragedy as a Juliet, yet is less inclined to buckle and snap under the pressure. When she wakes up next to a headless body that she believes to be her husband, her aria of grief is one of the finest WS ever wrote. No less impressive is her plucky determination to get on with her life, rather than follow her hubby into the grave.

   Posthumus, the hubby in question, is made of less attractive stuff, but when he comes to believe that Imogen is dead, as he ordered (this play is full of people getting things wrong and suffering for it), he rejects his earlier jealousy and starts to redeem himself a tad. There's a vicious misogyny near the heart of this play, as Shakespeare biographer Park Honan observed, kept in balance by a hatred of violence against women. The oafish prince Cloten, who lusts after Imogen, is a truly repellent piece of work, without even the intelligence of Iago or the horrified panic of Macbeth; his plan to kill Posthumus and rape Imogen before her husband's body is just about as squalid and vindictive as we expect of this louse, and when a long-lost son of the king (don't even _ask_) lops Cloten's head off, there are cheers all round.

   Shakespeare sends himself up all through "Cymbeline". I wonder if the almost ludicrously informative opening exposition scene isn't a bit of a gag on his part, but when a tired and angry Posthumus breaks into rhyming couplets, then catches himself and observes "You have put me into rhyme", we know that Shakespeare is having us on a little. Likewise, the final scene, when all is resolved, goes totally over the top in its piling-on "But-what-of-such-and-such?" and "My-Lord-I-forgot-to-mention" moments.

   Yet the moments of terror and pity are deep enough to make the jokiness feel truly earned. When Imogen is laid to rest and her adoptive brothers recite "Fear no more the heat o' the sun" over her body, it's as affecting as any moment in the canon. That she isn't actually dead, we don't find out until a few moments later, but it's still a great moment.

   Playful, confusing, enigmatic, funny and shot through with a frightening darkness, this is another top job by the Stratford boy. Well done.




4. A combination of "Romeo and Juliet," "Much Ado About Nothing," "As You Like It," and "King Lear?" Well somehow, Shakespeare made it work. Like "Romeo and Juliet" we have a protagonist (Imogen) who falls under her father's rages because she will not marry who he wants her to. Like "Much Ado About Nothing," we have a villain (Iachimo) who tries to convince a man (Posthumus) that the woman he loves is full of infidelity. Like "As You Like It," we have exiled people who praise life in the wilderness and a woman who disguises herself as a man to search for her family in the wilderness. Like "King Lear," we have a king who's rages and miscaculated judgement lead to disastorous consequences. What else is there? Only beautiful language, multiple plots, an evil queen who tries to undermind the king, an action filled war, suspense, a dream with visions of Pagan gods, and a beautiful scene of reconciliation at the end. While this is certainly one of Shakespeare's longer plays, it is well worth the time.



5. This is probably one of the most outdated and misleading of the Arden editions. Nosworthy really doesn't like the play and dismisses it as an experiment leading up to _The Tempest_. Even his editing of the text is affected by his reading of the play. Only scholars who know something about Shakespeare should venture here.

1 comments about Behan Complete Plays.

1. This review is of the first play in the book, The Quare Fellow.
   
   I highly recommend The Quare Fellow, the first play in the collection. I would like to see it performed. Behan's writing skills are comparable to those of Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes: first rate.
   
   I am not reviewing the entire collection because I haven't read it due to time limitations.

No comments about The New York Times Book of Broadway: On the Aisle for the Unforgettable Plays of the Last Century.

No comments about Family Communication: Cohesion and Change (7th Edition).

5 comments about Jesus Christ Superstar: A Rock Opera.

1. I was disappointed in the fact that music to all the songs were not included in the book. The nine songs that are in are good but to leave out the songs with Judas and the High Priests and Jesus and Pilate and Simon Zealots is not right.



2. Although this score does not include all the intermittent recitatives and orchestral arrangemtnts, it does offer a good piano transcription of the major songs with words. For anyone wnating to use any of the songs of JCS, this publication is very good.



3. For the most part, I was pretty impressed with this. There are some problems, most mentioned already. My biggest issue with this is that it doesn't include "Damned For All Time/Blood Money", my favorite song on JCS.



4. The songs included in this book are Heaven on Their Minds, Everything's Alright, Hosanna, Pilate's Dream, Last Supper, Gethsemane, King Herod's Song, and Superstar. A few things should be noted: Firstly, Heaven on their Minds does not include the "all gone sour" last four verses that are used in live productions of jcs. Instead the song is written to fade away. That might present a problem to people performing or using that song for an audition. The last supper only includes the chorus that the apostles sing. Superstar is tuned to a C instead of the original E that is on all of the recordings and live productions. Other than that, all the other keys are the same as you might hear them on cd recordings, 1973 movie, and live productions. Chords are also included for guitar players.



5. This book contains the partitures of the songs mentioned in Uppercase in the Editorial's review and the lyrics for all the other songs of this great rock-opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The partitures are written for piano, with chords for guitar and lyrics, and are quite faithful to the original songs. They aren't difficult, so you can play them without too much troubles and remember with pleasure the voices of Yvonne Elliman, Carl Anderson, Ted Neeley and the other artists. This book doesn't give you a complete satisfaction if you are instead looking for a more "seriously" thing, with all the partitures including the instrumental songs.

5 comments about A Star Is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood's Biggest Movies.

1. Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins, two of Hollywood's biggest casting directors (their credits are listed on the cover of the book, there's no need for me to list them here), discuss the inner workings of casting a major Hollywood film.
   
   A Star Is Found is a (somewhat) candid description of the daily life of a major Hollywood casting director, recounting casting stories from several major films, citing extensively from A Beautiful Mind, Harry Potter, and The Princess Bride.
   
   What makes the book such an interesting page-turner is the quick, almost gossipy writing style. Once you start reading, it's hard to put it down. Finding out surprising facts about how a certain person was chosen for a role is always exciting, especially for anyone with a real interest in filmmaking or the film industry in general.
   
   There is a little bit of information and tips to smaller actors in how to behave in an audition, callback, screen test, and beyond, but mostly this book is dedicated to describing the casting adventures that have already occurred. The first few chapters mention the break down of actor categories: Wannabes, Unknowns, Working Actors, etc. The rest of the book is about casting the Stars, and how Unknowns became Stars. This has the effect of at first saying that everyone has a shot, and then saying, as long as you know someone or have been seen somewhere else.
   
   Janet and Jane discuss their rules of auditioning, involving always treating every actor fairlt, which is refreshing to hear from such a big casting team. Anyone who is at all interested in working in film should check out this book. It offers definite insight into how you can help a casting director do their job, and end up getting yourself a job (as an actor) because of it.



2. Interesting insight of what really goes on behind the scenes, hiring actors, getting movies made, and how it all goes down, by 2 women who were right in the middle of it and responsible for much of the success of many actors. Who knew!



3. The authors took turns "talking" and giving juicy tidbits about actors and hiring them. But this is not a tell-all. This is a heartfelt book about life making movies. I couldn't put it down. It made me appreciate movies more and the people who make them. It made me see how hard everybody works to bring about the finished product to theaters. The authors really want to help people succeed in auditions and provided good advice for show biz veterans as well as introducing the process to people like me, who have nothing to do with Hollywood. This book was a sprinkle of stardust. Anyone, read it. I loved it.



4. A view from the other side. There have been a lot of books on how hard it is for an actor to find that magic break that gets him into a movie or on stage. In this book, two veteran casting directors present their side of the story. It's not a how-to book, exactly, but reading between the lines you can see what turns them off and how they build a huge list of potential candidates from a want-to-be that's now waiting tables up to the superstars. For the beginner, even getting in front of Janet and Jane is a major accomplishment.
   
   Part of the value in this book is that it explains just what it is that a casting director does. They are inbetween the actors and the film's management. They exist to take off some of the burdon from the director/producer, but they also provide an expertise of their own based on years of experience in finding actors.
   
   The list of movies on which the authors have worked is long. The inside stories of how actors get picked is fascinating. It's quite an interesting read, even for an outsider like myself.



5. A Star is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood's Biggest Movies is a rarity among the flood of acting and Hollywood guides on the market: a survey which examines how actors are chosen and careers made, coming from two of the top casting directors in the business. You can't get much more authoritative than this: the two review their craft, reflect on stars they helped build, and offer specific tips actors can use to catch attention and interest. Any collection strong in acting guides, drama or Hollywood insights will welcome this expose.
   
   Diane C. Donovan
   California Bookwatch