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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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