Spellbound: The Wonder-filled Life of Doug Henning

by John Harrison

By 1974, magic had lost its mass appeal and there was no such thing as a celebrity magician until a skinny, bucktoothed kid from Winnipeg became an overnight star in an unlikely Broadway musical called The Magic Show. Doug Henning, with his refreshingly modern approach to the art of illusion, permanently changed the face of magic and reintroduced an entire generation of audiences to grand illusion as a theatrical art. John Harrison traces Doug's stunning rise to fame from his humble beginnings in the Toronto coffeehouse circuit to his fantastic success as the world s first celebrity magician in fifty years. Told with exacting detail and reverence for its subject, The Wonder-filled Life of Doug Henning is an engaging story about the making of a master illusionist and his unrelenting search for real magic. From the highest rated magic television special in history, to three Broadway shows, to a decade of touring, John Harrison takes us on a backstage tour of Doug s performing life and gives a behind-the-scenes look at the mysterious world of grand illusion. All of Doug s astounding feats, like making an elephant vanish and walking through a brick wall, are featured in this engaging biography of a man who believed he would one day be able to levitate without resorting to his illusionist s bag of tricks. As amazing as his onstage life, Doug Henning s journey through the bizarre world of transcendental meditation and his brush with politics are told with equal intrigue. The Wonder-filled Life of Doug Henning is as exciting as Doug Henning's miracles themselves, filled with captivating adventures, like Doug's harrowing moments while submerged upside down in Houdini s Water Torture Cell on live television, his several heart-stopping incidents with rampaging tigers, and his attempt to build an amusement park in Niagara Falls. From his first magic trick making a quarter disappear to his eventual retirement from the stage at the height of his career, the fantastic life and career of Doug Henning come vividly to life in this magical biography.

440 pages, Hardcover

First published August 10, 2009

About the author

There are more than 16 authors in the GoodReads database with this name. This is John^Harrison (adventurer, writer, broadcaster & lecturer), . This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.

After hitch-hiking from London to Johannesburg before he was 21, and two further years hitching around every country in South and Central America, John never really shook off the travel bug. He studied Latin American History and Sociology at university before becoming a language teacher in Spain and Portugal. He then worked as a tour guide for Journey Latin America, taking small groups to South America, and bringing most of them back. It was during this time that he started making his own expeditions – especially to the Amazon. A lover of wilderness, he has also canoed in Africa, Europe and North America.
‘Up the Creek: an Amazon Adventure’, originally published in 1986, and was reissued in February 2012, was an account of one of these journeys, and ‘Into the Amazon: an incredible story of survival in the jungle' was published in 2011.
The film ‘John Harrison Explorer’ was made for the ‘Voyager’ series by National Geographic in 1991, about a canoe journey on the Rio Ximim-Ximim in Brazil.
John has written and presented several radio programmes for the BBC, and contributed articles to many magazines and newspapers.
He has entertained audiences with more than 200 lectures over the last 25 years, including four talks at the Royal Geographical Society in London, (where he has also chaired three seminars on tropical forest expedition logistics), plus motivational seminars and visits to schools and Luncheon Clubs. He has also been an on-board speaker for the Cunard, Silversea, Seabourn, Holland America and Fred Olsen cruise lines.
He lives in Bristol in the UK with his wife and two children, where he has his own construction company.

Reviews

[MagicDave · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great biography of Doug Henning, who presented magic with an upbeat way of presenting illusions that reinvigorated Magic's appeal to audiences in the 1970s. John Harrison has done a great job of chronicling Doug's life, with its highs and lows, his tours, and his eventual disenchantment with touring.

[Telps · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book. Gave me an understanding of a performer I grew up watching. Strangely, this book is poorly edited. There are a number of grammatical errors which were distracting to me. I would recommend this book to anyone wondering how modern magic got its reintroduction to the world.