Jacobs’s “The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World’’ and Ethan Gilsdorf’s “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks’’ - tales about a certain breed of funny, nerdy, highly literate man explaining his obsessions. “Fooling Houdini’’ sits firmly in the subgenre of A.J. This is how he decides to put together a showstopping card trick that has some rather sophisticated math behind it. For his act to come across as authentic and true, he realizes, it needs to come from a place he knows: the language of mathematics. Later on, he realizes that while there is a near-infinite array of types of tricks he could employ in his act, most of them don’t fit his personality. At one point, he reflects on the difference between the deception it takes to create an enjoyable act and the much more questionable sort employed by the likes of controversial TV medium John Edward. That may sound too philosophical for such a fun memoir, but when Stone invokes this question it comes across as pitch perfect.
Stone does this all while juggling (with frequent drops) his course load at Columbia and often failing to have a normal adult social life.
“Fooling Houdini’’ traces his path to restoring his confidence and repairing his act, taking us along the way through contemporary magic at every level, from old-timer legends hanging out in dusty Manhattan pizza joints to elite magic classes and conventions in locales from Vegas to Lima. A nervous Stone flubs his act, humiliating himself and sparking a brief retreat from the world of magic.īut he can’t stay away long.
The book picks up at the 2006 World Championships of Magic in Stockholm. Stone, a former editor at Discover Magazine who left his job to get a master’s degree in physics from Columbia University, developed an interest in magic from an early age thanks to his father, who was a fan. In “Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks and the Hidden Powers of the Mind,’’ Alex Stone takes us inside the world of Vegas illusionists, shady three-card monte dealers on Lower Manhattan’s Canal Street, and seemingly perfect card tricks.
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