It's a clever idea: an actor is used to developing a character in a play, why not apply the same approach to life in the business? Most actors, Joan Drake Brody asserts, have given up after the age of forty – she offers tools to achieve longevity in the business. Her central conceit is to use the language of drama training for her self-help book about a career in acting.
There are chapters dealing with objectives, beats, obstacles, building a character: all, of course, familiar Stanislavski terms.
More than that, Drake Brody provides detailed information about casting, auditions, rehearsals and working the market. It is very practical and has a good deal of common sense advice.
However, despite spell-check being switched to English UK, so that ‘Theatre’ appears the British way throughout, there is next to no recognition in this book of the UK acting world. As the blurb on the back of the book says, this is ‘aimed at actors looking to work in the USA’, where the author lives, and which presumably is the market she wrote for. There is much about New York, LA, Philadelphia and Washington DC; nothing about London, Manchester, Glasgow or Cardiff. For the budding UK actor, this is less helpful.
I might recommend a student turn to this book for advice about dos and don'ts of the profession, especially if considering working full time in the USA. As a guide to the UK acting business, though, this doesn't really address the given circumstances.