This is a great book of show tunes. There is quite a bit of variety here. Many new songs are included, along with plenty of old favorites. The music is challenging to play, but you can always fake it, if you're a piano hack like me!

I "read" this book because I'm a big fan of broadway and have always wanted to learn new showtunes. This book is great if you want to learn lyrics of great songs. Many of the songs in this book are popular such as "Memory" from Cats.

There is quite a bit of variation in this book. there are songs from all sorts of musicals. If you want to learn the tunes of the songs in this book, it helps yo play the piano or quitar. The songs are mostly in b flat. There are many time signatures too. I play violin, and I could learn tunes by playing violin using the music in this book too. If you are looking for some songs to sing for an audition, or to play for an audition, or just for fun-this book is great!

I am a singer and many of the songs I sing come from this book my favorite is "Being Alive". It's got a lot of songs from very familiar Musicals like the King and I and Sound of Music. Also most of the arragements are not bad either.

Perhaps one of the reasons that this little book is only a minor classic is its title: "A Rumor of Angels." The book is not about angels or the disembodiment of humans. Neither is it a study of rumor networks or gossip. Nor should the book be taken whimsically or trivially as if it had something to do with fairy tales, ghost stories, or apparitions. Concerned that his earlier book - The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion - "could be read as a treatise on atheism," in 1969 Berger wrote a Rumor of Angels as a sequel and antidote.

Berger explains how worldviews are built up and maintained by conversation and what he calls "plausibility structures." Without such social support structures one's knowledge of the world can be seen as deviant or even pathological. Berger tells us that there is an allegation in modern secular society that conversation about religion has shifted from a dialogue to a monologue. The process of secularization is alleged to have reduced the transcendent dimension of life to the status of an unconfirmed "rumor." Berger traces these rumors to their source and calls our attention to five "signals of transcendence" embedded into the fabric of society that indicate a transcendent dimension: order, hope, play, humor and damnation. These five signals aren't like the mystical symbol systems of the Christian Trinity (God, son, spirit), or of Marxism (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), or psychoanalysis (id, ego, superego), or of democracy (executive, judicial, legislative).

Without a social order life becomes meaningless, homeless, and loveless, even malevolent. The propensity to hope in the face of suffering and death is another example of the transcendent. Play is a signal of transcendence from the grimness of life's realities and the "iron cage" of large impersonal bureaucratic organizations. Humor laughs at the discrepancy between what "is" and "ought" to be, and the comic discrepancy between tiny men living in a massive cosmos. A sense that some acts are damnable even though we can't escape the relativities of the world implies a transcendent moral order. These five signals are not logical or philosophical proofs for God or angels or religious belief, but Berger tells us they are signposts of transcendence that can only be seen and accepted on the basis of faith. As Berger puts it in one of his later writings, "God plays a game of hide and seek with mankind and leaves more than a few hints where he may be hiding" (A Far Glory, 1992).

I have found these five arguments for the persistence of the transcendent to be more intriguing and credible than any theological or philosophical arguments for God. The nonbeliever will find the numerous references in the Christian bible to angels and demons as a considerable stumbling block to religious faith. But Berger points out a sociological truism: belief and non-belief is socially located. Intellectuals often regard beliefs in such things as miracles or divine messengers as figurative and literary devices and look down on people who believe them; while the masses often believe in them or at least talk about such things. Honest belief in a supernatural dimension isn't a matter of intelligence or social class. What accounts for the difference is one's worldview.

By definition a rumor is considered to be a message that lost its original meaning; that ended up distorted as it was passed along the rumor grapevine. Berger, the sociologist par excellence, removes the distortions and traces the rumors to their source and believes they reveal the true human condition. Berger often writes very "heady" topics in a wry, witty, and almost comic manner. He is such a believer in the comic dimension as a signal of transcendence that he later wrote a whole book on the subject of humor ("Redeeming Laughter, 1997). So it is fitting to end this book review with one of Berger's inimitable jokes that may best describe his book A Rumor of Angels: "when a joke-teller tells you that he is no longer joking - don't believe him."

Also recommended:
Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, 1967.
Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience, 1997.
Peter S. Williams, The Case for Angels, 2002.
Peter L. Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credibility, 1992.