Steinmeyer never tenders a deflating moment, even after the tricks are turned inside out. A buoyant articulation of the...
A good-natured, respectful, and modestly revelatory excursion through a century of the magic arts from one of the innovators of the game.
“My experience tells me that the story of magicians can only be understood when you understand their art. And the secrets are only impressive when you understand the people responsible, the theatrics, and the history surrounding them,” writes illusionist Steinmeyer, who then genially proceeds to introduce the great magicians from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries: David Devant, Alexander Herrmann, the Meskelynes, and Howard Thurston. Harry Houdini is dismissed as a “terrible magician,” though as an escape artist he was in the firmament, and his disappearing elephant does capture Steinmeyer’s imagination, if only for its magnitude and bravura. They were all, Steinmeyer writes, comfortable in both the worlds of theater and science, likely to cultivate reputations for travel to lands of wonder—the Indian subcontinent or the Himalaya of flying monks. With low-key panache, Steinmeyer clues us in on smoke and angles, sightlines and dark pits, synchronized counting, distraction, the gooseneck that allowed a hoop to pass around a levitating body, the exploitation of audiences’ anticipations, preconceptions, and assumptions—though sadly, we learn, many a neat trick went to the grave with its creator. Mostly, though, Steinmeyer tells of mirrors and panes of glass, of the optical formulas for invisibility. Need an elephant to vanish? Get a big mirror and a good angle. For other disappearing acts, build a Porteau Cabinet or a Corsican Trap, a Maskelyne’s Gorilla Den or Davenport Spirit Cabinet. Each works with mirrors, and Steinmeyer explains how (though rope tricks remain difficult to grasp after what appears—remember, never trust appearances in the company of magicians—a very clear explanation).
Steinmeyer never tenders a deflating moment, even after the tricks are turned inside out. A buoyant articulation of the brilliance and brains behind the best artists’ ingenious feats. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1226-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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