Alex Stone's Blog

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We’re thrilled to announce The Best Books of the Year, featuring our editors’ 100 favorite books from 2012. These are the books we’ve loved the most this year, and we think you will too. And until the end of the year, you can save up to 40% in our Best of the Year Store.

Amazon Best Books of the Month, June 2012: Before reading this book, I thought magic was a little inane. The magicians of my memory wore capes and makeup. They pulled doves from their hats and deployed a lot of smoke. But in Fooling Houdini, Alex Stone reveals a world far deeper and fascinating than I ever imagined. After failing at the Magic Olympics in Stockholm, Stone gets serious about the art of illusion. He attends magic schools and seeks out one of the best “card mechanics” in the world. Along the way, he learns how criminal empires were built on age-old magic scams. He studies the art of mind-reading. And he explains how magicians exploit cognitive blind spots to make the impossible happen in public. He pursues every dark nook of the magic world in pursuit of the ultimate goal – a routine so mindboggling that it would fool other master magicians. Does he succeed? I’d tell you the answer, but that would ruin the magic. –Benjamin Moebius

“….a journalist with a master’s in physics and an amateur magician who competed in the 2006 Magic Olympics — pulls back the curtain on the secretive world of magicians.”