The dust jacket shows normal wear and tear. This is an ex library book, stickers and markings accordingly Hardcover Book, Good condition but not perfect, Cover has minor nicks and tears, spine shows some creases from use. Ask Questions and request photos if your buying for the cover and not the content. Items are uploaded with their own individual photo, but when Multiple Items are for sale only one representative photo may be shown. Actual Photos are availible upon request. Fast Shipping Monday Through Saturday! - Safe and Secure! Additional Details ------------------------------ Product description: Taubman has many useful things to say about the present state of American theatre and its future but only hints at them. One wishes he had slowed the pace a bit, even at the sacrifice of a certain amount of nostalgia. The book might have been the really important work it shows our theatre needs and like so many of the plays Taubman has reviewed, attempts to contain something for everyone -- with the usual mixed results. Changing and unchanging; Decorum and morality; Patriotism and an American flavor; A problem child; Actors and sharp-shooters; Hurrah for republican simplicity!; Stars and spectacles; The pendulum swings; Realism of a sort; The players were the thing; New century, boom times; Real stagy life; Operettas and follies; Pressure for change; Business as usual, and different; Eugene O'Neill; New voices in the ’20s; Musical theatre in transition; Twin menaces; In the commercial mainstream; Hope out of despair; The loud, rude, vigorous ’30s; In the war years; Brave plans, vain hopes; A new era, the musical dominates; Forgetting the war; Skidding downhill; Of violence and fluff; Quality from abroad; The musical triumphant; The rise of off Broadway; Disarray in the’60es; Many valleys, few peaks; Of acting, directing and designing; New forces and new hope. Howard Taubman (1907 – 1996) graduated from Cornell in 1929 and shortly thereafter went to work for the New York Times. Lacking any formal music training, naturally he joined the Times’s music department in 1930. Only a few months after succeeding Olin Downes as chief music critic in 1955, Taubman would become the mouthpiece for the Philharmonic’s principal violist William Lincer and the anti-Mitropoulos faction. At the same time Taubman was ghostwriting Marian Anderson’s autobiography My Lord, What a Morning. He later became chief drama critic and later a critic-at-large for the Times. He also worked as a consultant to Exxon Corporation for the PBS series Great Performances.