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
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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