Entertaining and brimming with wonder.
Unlocking the doors to the legendary performer’s world of magic.
Noting that there are more than 500 books about Ehrich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini (1874-1926), MLB.com national columnist Posnanski (The Secret of Golf: The Story of Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, 2016, etc.) still delivers a jaunty and infectious biography of the famous magician and his impact on magic and popular culture. The author relates his discussions with magicians who have emulated or criticized Houdini’s magic as well as the “truest believer[s]” who have studied and written about him for years. As a young boy, writes Posnanski, “locks spoke to Houdini, and Houdini understood.” Though he said he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, he was actually born in Budapest. This lie, discovered Posnanski, is a key to understanding how Houdini achieved his mythic status. “[Houdini] believed that magic was about the performer more than the performance,” writes the author, “and the bigger, gaudier, more dangerous, more thrilling, the better.” Posnanski’s Houdini is a consummate liar and a genius at self-promotion. He hired ghost writer H.P Lovecraft to “tell exaggerated tales about him or write short stories under the Houdini name” and planted self-aggrandizing stories about himself in the local newspapers of the towns where he performed. Posnanski is excellent at describing Houdini’s greatest escapes, from the famous Mirror Cuffs to straitjackets. The author chronicles his visit to David Copperfield’s private museum; the Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he viewed the rare Houdini film, The Grim Game; and the Academy of Magical Arts’ exclusive Magic Castle, where he finally got to meet Patrick Culliton, author of the rare and coveted Houdini: The Key. Houdini was good as a magician, Posnanski learns—he created the popular needles-in- the-mouth trick and made an elephant disappear—but he was, above all, a remarkable performer. Spoiler alert: The author does not reveal any Houdini secrets.
Entertaining and brimming with wonder.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3723-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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