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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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