The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski

Power.  That is why I wanted to be like Houdini, right.  For me, it's all about power.  I had felt so powerless as a child. I wanted to be able to do things no one else can do.  Instead, I couldn't do anything that everybody else could do.  I was not engaged.  I had learning disabilities.  I was dyslexic.  I was told when to go to bed, when to eat.  But. for now, for just a minute, I had control.
--Paul Cosentino, quoted in The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini by Joe Posnanski (Avid Reader Press, 2019)

Posnanski's breezy book is something of a biography of Houdini --trying to find the truth among the myths -- but it is also about the appeal of magic and why Houdini is remembered when many other possibly better magicians are mostly forgotten.  I was fascinated by Houdini when I was a kid and reading Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat (see my post last month) has somewhat revived my interest in magic.  What appealed to me was Houdini's ability to escape, not only from handcuffs, shackles and jail cells, but from his Jewish roots and his small town background.  When I was young my parents dragged me to "old car meets," which bored me, all these old guys fascinated by antique cars, so I would bring along my magic tricks when I was ten and eleven and show them to a usually very small audience;  this entertained me and gave me some power over these adults.  I was particularly good at card tricks and sleight-of-hand and, of course, would never reveal how I did my tricks.

Posnanski travel through the increasingly small world of magic and reads all the available literature.  Magic, of course, works only live and in person, television making it too easy to cheat, and with the death of the great Ricky Jay there is little stage magic about except occasionally in small theatres and to a certain extend in Las Vegas.  I continue to work on my card tricks.