The Mark Twain Forum needs a reviewer for the following book: Randall Knoper. _Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance_. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Pp. ix + 240. $35.00. Cloth, 6-1/2" x 9-1/4". ISBN 0-520-08619-8. The jacket describes it thus: The phenomenon of performance is central to Mark Twain's writing and persona. But Twain's performative aspects have usually been dismissed as merely theatrical and discounted as lowbrow burlesque. In _Acting Naturally_, Randall Knoper takes Twain's theatricality seriously, situating it in the culture of nineteenth-century popular performance ranging from blackface minstrelsy to the exhibitions of mesmerists and mediums. In so doing, he shows how Twain's work both echoes and engages the social and cultural problems embodied in such entertainments--the breach between high and low cultures, the uncertain signs of authenticity and sincerity, crises in the public presentation of gendered and racial selves, and the economics of commodities and their conspicuous display. Drawing on a wide array of interrelated contexts, such as theater history, theories of acting and bodily expression, new understandings of psychology and physiology, scientific accounts of spiritualism, and experiences of urban and commercial spectacles, Knoper demonstrates how carefully Twain used ideas of "acting" and the "natural" to explore expression and creativity. Twain understood representation itself in terms of the continuum of performance, from mimicry and theatrical effect to unconscious slips of body and tongue. His preoccupation with performance, and its extremes of posing and authenticity, led Twain deeply into nineteenth-century anxieties about the security of meaning and of sexual, racial, and social identity. By examining the many issues attending "performance" in Mark Twain's writings and American culture, _Acting Naturally_ provides a new understanding of Twain as an artist as well as a view of a culture whose entertainment registered the social, economic, and scientific forces that were transforming it. If you're interested in writing this review, please send me both your home and institutional mailing addresses and phone numbers. If I don't already know you, it would be helpful for you to explain in what respect you're qualified to write this review. (If we haven't exchanged e-mail recently, it might be a good idea for you to remind me of this info.) I look forward to hearing from you. Taylor Roberts Coordinator, MT Forum