referencebooks (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} referencebooks) wrote,@ 2006-05-19 09:53:00 |
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| Entry tags: | careers, theatre |
The Actor's Survival Handbook
The Actor's Survival Handbook
By Patrick Tucker and Christine Ozanne
Published by Routledge, 2005
This is a 5.5" by 8.5" clothbound book running to 330 pages, with no index, plus 26 pages of preferatory material. It is a well-manufactured book whose pages are printed with smallish margins.
Routledge is primarily an academic publisher. This book is unusual for them in that it is designed for use not by scholars but by actors who want to improve their acting and professionalism and advance their careers.
The book has 134 brief articles arranged alphabetically. Though the book lacks an index, a "family tree" classification of the entries is a help to finding relevant information where the article titles don't do it by themselves. Here is a list of the entries in the F, G, H, and I sequences:
- Fellow Actors
- Film versus Television
- Forgetting Lines
- Further Training
- Gear Changes
- Getting Work
- Good and Bad Taste
- Hierarchy
- Homework
- Illness
- Improvisation
- Instinct versus Intellect
- Interviews
- It's Not What It Used To Be
Opening the book at random, I'm looking at a single article running just over a page. The right-hand facing page is blank following the end of this article. The article is titled "Opposites" and is subtitled, "Always a useful device." It begins, "Acting opposites is a vital technique for producing the element of surprise for the audience." The article explains the usefulness and some technical issues involved in acting opposite emotions using clearly described hypothetical examples.
The book is fun and easy to read. It's clearly very useful for actors and a book that an actor would love to own. We have it in our reference section because it really works as a reference book, though it is not primarily about scholarship. For non-actors who are curious about acting it is an interesting read that provides a lot of insights.
