Story of an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances by a massive, protracted power outage in the Northeastern U.S. Fascinating glimpse of average Joe turned into tough-as-nails survivalist; riveting story.

The story of the textbook is to give students an appreciation of theatre, to delineate theatre from other Art forms such as sculpture, dance, and painting as well as film and sporting events. The text gives a concise and accurate, although thoroughly Western, overview of theatre history with brief emphasis on African and Asian theatre. One is taken Chapter by Chapter through a discovery process from the very broad appreciation of theatre as a performing art to the very specific nuances of various Asian performance techniques. Along the way there are three units broken up into various chapters. Unit one focuses on audience relationship to the stage, the social context of theatre, textual and visual analysis a.k.a audience appreciation. Unit Two analyzes the state of theatre today and occupations in theatre. Unit Three focuses entirely on theatre history with chapters on ancient theatre, the middle ages, neoclassicism, romanticism, avant garde, eclectic and current theatre, and concludes with world theatre (mainly African, Islamic, and Asian). The book's weaknesses are its decidedly Western and Caucasian focus, very little of the text is devoted to non-white theatre and (although much improved on other texts) there are very few multi-cultural photos and illustrations included. Also, there are no plays included in the text. It is difficult to encourage script analysis if no script is included, and one page of a script with blocking scribbled all over it does not suffice. There is not much focus on design besides explaining the role of designers in the theatrical process and showing different illustrations of various historical theatre buildings or areas. Lastly, not knowing how to eloquently state this, there is something disturbing about siphoning Chekhov, Ibsen, the Federal Theatre Project, Kathakali, avant garde, Ira Aldridge etc. to two paragraphs or less. By trying to include so many various historical topics in one relatively small text, the authors have sold many of them short. Overall, If used in combination with lectures or texts on design, live performance, and a collection of world drama or scripts this is a solid and very useful text.

"America on Film" explores the presense, in American movies, of historical subject matter. This book suffers on many levels. Cameron drowns the reader in a host of references to specific films, without going into great detail about enough of them. Second, the author seems bent upon harshly criticizing every film that he discusses. He doesn't seem to really enjoy cinema, but rather appears to focus on what various filmmakers have done wrong, in his estimation. A book of this nature should be critical and honest, true, but "America on Film" seems overly subjective, negative and narrow. He judges a film's quality, in large measure, by how accurately the plot and mise en scene correspond to the conventional historical record. This, of course, allows little room for interpretation, revisionionism or story-telling. He acts as though the value of a film lies solely in its ability to factually offer us the story we already know, when we've known--since at least Aristotle--that we enjoy the arts for their ability to allow us to suspend disbelief, if only momentarily, and find refuge in the world of fiction. Cameron is also weak on vision. He examines many individual films, but lacks the ability to make original insights about the world of film in general. I cannot recommend this text to anyone.

The previous review correctly identifies some of the problems with Cameron's book. Clearly, this is not the place to begin an exploration of historical films (Sorlin and Rosenstone offer much more sophisticated and nuanced entry points into the literature). However, Cameron's readings of individual films are often very sharp and sometimes hysterically funny. For example, take his reading of Bound for Glory, Midnight Express, and The Falcon and the Snowman.

A Horrid book! As usual, Cameron is overly, overtly subjective in his views. The text is crammed with minute details regarding film, yet it lacks any real analytical scope. Cameron has done his research, but the work is dry, dull and uninviting. He makes claims based on this research, but he does not argue them persuasively or elegantly.