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HERE IS REAL MAGIC

A MAGICIAN'S SEARCH FOR WONDER IN THE MODERN WORLD

Magic can be unnecessarily flashy, but this book isn’t flashy at all; it’s an assured and thoughtful work about finding true...

A magician conjures up memories, dreams, and reflections on his craft.

In this amiable and engaging memoir, professional magician Staniforth, a former host of the Discovery Channel’s Breaking Magic, reveals no secrets except about himself. The first part of the narrative is a portrait of a young man teaching himself to do magic and performing it, while the second is about a slightly older man in search of the true wonders of magic he had lost. He was a 9-year-old boy on an Ames, Iowa, playground when he made a coin vanish and reveled in the surprised looks on his playmates’ faces. As he writes, “I learned that you can say something with a magic trick that is hard to say any other way.” After he saw David Copperfield perform his magic, Staniforth realized he “wanted to do magic above all else.” He read everything he could find about magic and discovered Blackstone, Houdini, David Berglas, Paul Harris, and David Blaine. He practiced for hours. When he first began performing, he wanted to “give the audience an experience that rose above mere deception.” However, after five exhausting years on the road doing show after show, Staniforth became cynical about his craft; the real magic had disappeared. So he traveled to the other side of the world to India, the land of mystery, looking for magic. Traveling around with his filmmaker friend, he observed snake charmers, con men, holy men, mystics, gurus, and street performers, and he was chased down the street by a one-armed monkey. The author also learned about tantric yoga and the powerful Aarti ceremony by the Ganges River, which serves “as a way of thanking the holy river.” Some repetition and meandering somewhat mar this section, but the author’s descriptions of how he rediscovered real magic reinvigorate his story.

Magic can be unnecessarily flashy, but this book isn’t flashy at all; it’s an assured and thoughtful work about finding true “awe and wonder.”

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-63286-424-6

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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