Stephen Brook

An enjoyable meander through New York of the 1980s. The book is a series of short chapters or essays focusing on different aspects of New York. The author has a dry sense of humour and includes a mix of personal experiences, interviews and history.

A richly entertaining look at the sublimities and follies of the opera, both onstage and off. Gathering material from an impressively broad range of sources, the author provides the reader with sections on operatic history, practice, and issues, as well as regaling opera fans with amusing accounts of backstage antics. Anyone who has ever enjoyed an opera will relish these eyewitness recollections of opera's great singers, composers, conductors, and directors through three centures.

The dream is a strange thing, the place where consciousness and unconsciousness meet. English writer Stephen Brook extracts excerpts from poetry, novels, short stories, and essays from the depth and breadth of world literature that describe and confront dreams, how they are experienced and what they appear to mean.

Not a bad book, but because the information for the various sections was fit into eight to 10 page chunks, some topics are too light and others too heavy.