Review by Booklist Review
Middle-aged ennui strikes most of us, but it's a serious problem if it affects a magician. How do you perform illusions and mind-boggling tricks if your sense of wonder and awe is gone, if everything feels, well, ho-hum? Worse, says Staniforth in his magical memoir, modern American society has an antipathy toward magic. The Western magician operates in a culture where magic has no place in the daily movements of society, so it exists in the face of civilization rather than as a natural expression of it. So the successful magician threw it all away, for a while, to find himself in India. The world's largest democracy once might have been known as the mystical land of snake charmers, but the country has been trying to shake this image, and sure enough, Staniforth encounters people who quickly disabuse him of his outsider notions. But Staniforth also meets elusive Indian street magicians and eventually comes to terms with what a sense of wonder truly means. A passionate and eloquent call to seek to renew one's purpose in life.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Magician Staniforth, best known for his Discovery show Breaking Magic, wonderfully captures the joys and struggles of becoming a working magician and what happened to him when his fascination with his craft faded. From an early age, ever since he made a coin disappear on the playground, Staniforth knew he wanted to be a magician, not only because of the "open-mouthed wonder" his playground trick evoked from his audience but also because the moment was even "far more amazing for" him than it was for them. But as he strove to be like his heroes Houdini and David Copperfield, Staniforth burned out on the traveling magic circuit and lost touch with the reason he became a magician in the first place. Asking himself, "Where do you find wonder after you have lost it?" he traveled to India to watch magic shows and feel like he did when "he didn't know the secrets." In New Delhi, he meets and old street magician who says: "The real magic is your hard work. If you do hard work, that will show you magic." During the course of his trip, Staniforth rekindled his passion. He ends his books with suggestions on how to "bring wonder back into your ordinary life." The result is a personal story that conjures up the wonder and magic of life without any trickery or deceit. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 mars this section, but the author's descriptions of how he rediscovered real magic reinvigorates 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." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
