American Puppetry: Collections, History and Performance, edited by Phyllis T. Dircks, is a valuable collection of essays on the state of puppet theatre in America and useful documentations of extant collections that will serve puppeteers. Dircks identifies the need for this work in her introduction when she, rightly, comments that “[f]ortunately, thousands of puppets from various cultures and many time periods have been collected by scholars, enthusiasts and curators, who wisely realized that these material images can teach us much about the society for which they were crafted” (4). Her careful and thorough collection chronicles the well-known, such as Bread and Puppet, the Muppets, and Howdy Doody, as well as the lesser-known facts in the field of puppetry—for example, Peter Arnott's use of puppets to stage plays from classical dramatic literature. The volume is also up to date; the work of Julie Taymor is discussed for its fusion of human performers with the surreal and for its highly imaginative puppet creations.