Jim SteinmeyerRecensioner

LIked it.
I feel the authopr used the better known Houdini to lure people to the book, only to then say a lot of negative things about him, but otherwise enjoyed the book.

The title is a little misleading as it is more of a biography with little details here and there that actually concerns Dracula. Not a bad read though.

Steinmeyer tries to unravel the influences behind Bram Stoker’s creation of the world’s most famous fictional vampire.

He uses his central thesis that the infamous Count was formed out of an amalgamation of Stoker’s friends and acquaintances to present a series of mini-biographies of his chief suspects. The handling of the various subjects is uneven and there’s a fair degree of supposition and conjecture on how each influenced the author of Dracula (in some cases I’m not sure they did at all.)

The book concludes with a look at the history of Dracula on stage and it’s rise in pop culture, but other than a few passing mentions totally overlooks the impact of the cinematic incarnations.

In the end I’m not sure who the book was aimed at, nor did it lay out a convincing case for it’s thesis.

This is a well documented and interesting biography. It provides a very comprehensive picture of the times and the evolution of magic as entertainment.

The Last Greatest Magician in the World is a BIG book about a man you probably never heard of -- Howard Thurston -- who started out as a penniless street hustler and wound up an international star of a hugely popular magic show that was an evening of top-drawer entertainment all across America in the days before radio and the movies killed off vaudeville.

The image everyone has of the stage magician with the black dress suit and the top hat is really Thurston though other copied the look after him.

The Thurston show traveled on its own train with cars full of equipment and people and lions and other animals too. He more or less invented - with some help - the changing the lady into a lion trick.

If you wonder why magicians used to say "There's nothing up my sleeve" well it was Thurston who perfected the "back-palm" and got conjurers once and for all out of the business of tucking cards and coins and other props up inside their (baggy) dress suits.

For someone like me who studied magic as a kid its fun to see that the principles of the big tricks haven't changed much in a century - fascinating. And the author gets points for not revealing how tricks are done even while discussing the fine points of Thurston's presentation.

The book is good about the gossip and petty jealousies of the magic community -- maybe more than you want to know but it's a fun read anyway.. The competition with Houdini - well there really wasn't one. They did very different kinds of shows and were in very different kinds of markets and were (more or less) friendly to each other anyway

The Last Magician stuff is also kind of problematic - the end of vaudeville ended all the big touring shows including the big touring magic shows including Thurstons. But magic - thanks to Las Vegas and television goes on and on. .
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Biography of Chung Ling Soo who managed to kill himself on-stage with hs
bullet-catching trick. A good read - I seem to remember seeing a black-and-white
film about this on television in the 1960s? Entertaining stuff.

It's very strange, I find watching 'magicians' on-stage incredibly boring and
highly sleep-inducing. Reading about them is fascinating!½

Not as good a bio as the author did for Charles Fort, but it could be the seeming padding of this book. The gist of it really ought to be a great article or short-form novella, but it got filled out to standard book length with a lot of seemingly irrelevant side matter. (Honestly, I know Oscar Wilde nearly married the woman who became Stoker's wife, but did his history & trial and info thereabouts really need to fill two chapters in a book ostensibly about Stoker & the origins of his DRACULA novel?)

Engagingly written and well enough done to finish, but frustrating for its meandering off course and off topic. It was like a college course lecture by a well-liked professor whose attention to his topic wavered but eventually returned.

Great bio of a far more interesting person than I'd expected.

If nothing else, the world owes Charles Fort for having coined the term "teleportation."

This is a wonderful history of the high points of stage magic, centering around the early 1900s, within a framework of explaining how Houdini vanished an elephant on the stage of the Hippodrome. Woven throughout are real-life stories of intrique, espionage, jealousy, creativity and love (of magic) - along with the secrets of how some of the most memorable stage illusions actually work.

Very readable and edifying.

For fans of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, this book provides a fascinating insight into the life and times of Mr. Stoker as well as various other figures whom the author argues influenced Stoker's work including Henry Irving, Walt Whitman, and Oscar Wilde. The book reads well as the author writes in a straightforward style. Aside from the material about the creation of Dracula as a novel, the stories of each of the gentlemen above who allegedly influenced the work also make for interesting reading.

On the down side, the author's arguments that Jack the Ripper was influential is a bit silly and seemingly included only for shock value, as was the argument that the novel was sexual in nature. While a good writer, these are perhaps the most glaring of the author's failed attempts at deeper insights into Mr. Stoker's work.

Essays on stage magic. Not as fascinating as his other books - a little more academic, but still a good read.
Strange - stage magicians bore me rigid but reading about them is fascinating.½

Strange, stage magic bores me rigid, but I find books on the subject fascinating.
A very readable biography of Houdini's rival, Howard Thurston½

Entertaining survey of stage magic covering the 19th and (first part of the)
20th centuries. This is really a vastly entertaining book.

It's very strange, I find watching 'magicians' on-stage incredibly boring and
highly sleep-inducing. Reading about them is fascinating!

Out now in paperback is the story of Howard Thurston, a contemporary of Harry Houdini and arguably the most successful magician of his day. Unfortunately, he was not the best at budgeting his fortunes. Or, maybe, not “unfortunately.” Thurston used every dime he earned, and quite a few borrowed dimes, to construct increasingly more elaborate illusions. The illusions created by Thurston and built by his engineers are still enjoyed today by audiences everywhere. Steinmeyer’s book is satisfyingly full of the rivalries between magicians of the early 20th century and the risks of not retaining their trusted staff, who could eventually become someone else’s right hand. If you are a fan of Christopher Priest’s Prestige, you will truly enjoy the reality that fills the pages of The Last Greatest Magician in the World.

This review was originally written for Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore.

Fort was a fascinating character. This biography is far more readable than any of Fort's actual books. Interesting and just the right length. I was surprised to learn that Fort was reporting a great deal with his tongue in his cheek. I always thought he was a great big crank. Turns out that's not true. Odd, yes. But crazy? No. There's also a lot of information about Theodore Dreiser here, as he was more or less Fort's mentor. And H. G. Wells provides background snark, as does Mencken. The book is pretty light on recitations of weird phenomena, which is okay by me.

This shit is totally up my alley, man.

Who was Dracula? Well apparently he was much more than just his creator, Bram Stoker. At best, Stoker was for the most part, a mediocre writer, gaining very little acknowledgement from critics in his time. He was, however, an excellent manager for one of the Victorian era's major stage actors, Henry Irving. Stoker dedicated his life to helping Irving, who has almost vanished into history, achieve fame on the English stage. In turn, Stoker borrowed freely from Irving's character to help characterize Dracula. Bram also drew from other personalities of the time, with whom he was well acquainted, notably Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and perhaps even Jack the Ripper. The book notes in detail Stoker's interactions with these personalities. It attempts to detail what characteristics Bram borrowed either consciously or unconsciously, to invest in his character, Dracula. It would take Stoker seven years to meld his thoughts with some of the characteristics of these persons, thus giving birth to Dracula. Although Dracula appears in only 60 or so pages of his 400 page opus, Stoker created a character that would take on a life of it's own. This book much like it's subject, Dracula, is at times lusty and full of life, while at other times it can descend into the dryness and dust of history. Book provided for review by the well read folks at Tarcher/Penguin.

Terrifically enjoyable history of magic. You may have heard the line "they do it all with mirrors." That turns out to be quite accurate.

True in India. True here

The title of this book sugests Charles Fort invented the Supernatural; as if he came up with the strange stories in the manuscript. He didn't actually invent the Supernatural, he just brought it to the American consciousness. Through in depth research of all the sciences, done at the New York Public Library, The British Museum, and from newspaper articles, he collected strange accounts and compiled them into four different books starting with "The Book of The Damned" in 1920. He presented the material in a humorous way that said "make of it what you will." Fort despised Scientists and Theologians and came up with his own wacky cosmology. He coined the term teleportation and brought to light such phenomena as frogs falling from the sky, unexplained flying objects, spontainious human combustion, and the mysteries of Kaspar Hauser, and The Mary Celeste. Without him we wouldn't have television shows like "In Search of", "Unexplained Mysteries", and "The X-Files."

In modern times we would say Charles Fort was a victim of an abusive father, but in Victorian days his upbringing was just considered strict. When Charles or his two younger brothers were punished they were usually beaten. When beatings no longer worked, they were locked in the cellar without food or light. Understanding this type of upbringing is essential in understanding the man. He was extremely shy and often despondent. As a boy he developed an obsession to collect and catalog specimens from nature. This developed into a mania for gathering strange scientific observations as an adult. Fort was trying to make since of his world.

A few prominent authors were fans and friends of Fort's including Theodore Dreiser who was interested in Fort's idea of Monism or a universal oneness. Other authors, along with Dreiser, started the first Fortian Society which included; Ben Hecht, John Cowper Powys, Booth Tarkington, and Alexander Woollcott. H. L. Mencken and H. G. Wells were a few of the popular writers of the time that despised him.

This was a well researched and lovingly written book. The author obviously likes Fort and his unusual books. The volume is easy to read and very informative with many notes and quotations from Fort's personal letters and his unpublished autobiography. I have come away from this book liking Charles Fort and I look forward to reading his quirky books in the future.

The influence of Charles Fort on popular culture isn’t that of some seeping, hidden stream percolating out of the depths of history to mysteriously water modern ideas. It’s more of a shaded river whose twisting path abuts a surprising number of cultural. The subtitle is a bit of marketing hyperbole. As Steinmeyer himself notes, Fort said the word “supernatural” had no place in his vocabulary, no meaning. But his peculiar works, four bizarre mixtures of satire and philosophy; compendiums of strange events and sometimes whimsical, sometimes sinister, sometimes absent explanations, known collectively as The Books of Charles Fort, are an important source stream for the torrents of writing on the paranormal the 20th century saw, Berlitz and von Daniken, ufology and raining frogs. His works are explicitly referenced in horror fiction as long ago as H. P. Lovecraft and as contemporaneously as Stephen King and Caitlin Kiernan. His ideas show up in the film Magnolia and an actual character in the recent movie The Whisperer in Darkness. He even gave us the word “teleportation”. And, of course, his name lives on in that indispensable journal of oddities, The Fortean Times.

This isn’t the first work from a major publisher on Fort. Damon Knight, the science fiction writer, did the worthy biography Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained in 1970. But this has several advantages, besides availability, over Knight’s work. Not only does this work have photographs, but it also has numerous quotes from Fort’s earlier writings before 1920’s The Book of the Damned as well as the reactions, in private and in reviews, to those works. There are also selections from Fort’s unpublished autobiography Many Parts. This edition helpfully sets these quotes off in italics which further makes this a handsome production. After an unhappy childhood under a domineering and sometimes violent upper-middle class father, Fort left home at 17; worked as newspaper reporter for about three years; bummed about America, South Africa, Canada, and Britain for a couple of years; and returned home where he married, in 1896, Anna, a woman four years his senior. For the next 12 years, Fort and Anna lived poorly, supported by numerous stories, mostly of a realistic nature and noted for the verisimilitude of their dialogue and setting, that were published in several well-known magazines of the time. These brought him to the attention of Theodore Dreiser who was to become a lifelong friend. Dreiser used his growing reputation and fame to get Fort’s first novel published: The Outcast Manufacturers. Steinmeyer presents some interesting selections from this comic yet realistic novel of slum dwellers – usefully drawn from the Fort’s own impoverished circumstances.

From 1908 to 1918, Fort worked on two works that, to the despair of Fortean scholars and enthusiasts, are lost and known only through letters: “X” and “Y”. Steinmeyer tries to piece out their structure and underlying philosophies, and they seemed to have been closer to conventional fiction, perhaps in the style of The Outcast Manufacturers, than his later and more famous works. “X” seems to have been the story of the influence, exerted by mysterious rays, of a Martian civilization on human history. Fort even wrote a film treatment for it when Dreiser thought he was getting a job in the movies as a “scenario director”. “Y” was about a secret polar civilization and worked in the enigmatic Kaspar Hauser. While Dreiser was an enthusiastic cheerleader – he even used what he thought of as Fort’s serious philosophy in a play he wrote, publishers didn’t bite.

Then Fort came up with “Z”, what became The Book of the Damned, and Fort and his bizarre, staccato prose, his absolute skepticism in refusing to take any belief seriously, to note no categories, to mock astronomers and other scientists who “damned” inconvenient data, entered the world’s consciousness.

It’s for that earlier story of Fort’s life, and not the better known content of his four famous works, that is one of the book’s main values. The other is trying to discern any sort of true belief, any philosophical stance in Fort, to answer the question: crank or genius? He offers many contemporary insights from the famous to forgotten. H. L. Mencken thought Fort was pedaling nonsense. H. G. Wells scoffed at Fort, said that science was an exploration of the world, not the orthodoxy Fort claimed. While science writer and Fort correspondent Maynard Shipley agreed with Wells on Fort’s misunderstanding of the process of science and felt Fort was overpraised, he also acknowledged Fort’s writings left “a new and exhilarating emotion” in the reader that would color all his future readings of science. Fort interestingly admired Shipley’s review and said he saw himself pioneering a new literature that, in a world where movies would take over conventional drama, novels must have something besides humans for their character and that his damned data might be the substitute.

Fort’s predictions, of course, for the future of fiction did not prove true. Indeed, while Dreiser compared his singular literary genius to Poe, Fort had no stylistic imitators even among those dealing with similar subjects.

The last thing this biography brings to the table is a nice coda, a wrap up of Fort’s influence and what happened to those who were his ardent admirers like Ben Hecht and Tiffany Thayer and, of course, Dreiser. (It’s interesting to note that, rather like the circle of figures around H. P. Lovecraft, many of these names are probably remembered today only because of their association with Fort. Even Dreiser is becoming little known for anything besides providing the source novel for the film A Place in the Sun.) And Steinmeyer also corrects an old, unkind, and untrue notion that Anna Fort was a dullard little interested in her husband’s work. Indeed, she was his first reader, the one he tested all his fiction out on first as well as whatever those four books are.

In short, this book is required reading for anyone just developing their interest in the man behind “Fortean phenomena”. For those already familiar with Fort’s life and work, Steinmeyer presents enough new, primary source material to also make this book essential.

A great overview of the Golden age of Magic & the characters that inhabited it. Very good on their interactions, their inventions but less so on the "wonder" of what was, probably the finest age to be a magician. You don't have to have a particular interest in magic to enjoy this, just the need to be captivated and enjoy peformance art. At times flabby & that is what stopped me giving it 5 stars

About the Author. Jim Steinmeyer identifies himself on the World Wide Web as "a designer and inventor of illusions and theatrical special effects, for magicians and Broadway shows." Steinmeyer invented and created illusions for Doug Henning, David Copperfield, the Pendragons, Lance Burton, Ricky Jay and others. His best known illusions include Vanishing the Statue of Liberty, Origami Illusion, Hologram Illusion, Interlude, and Walking Through a Mirror. Steinmeyer designed special effects for theatrical shows, such as, Beauty and the Beast, Into the Woods, Mary Poppins, and Phantom of the Opera. The Academy of Magical Arts (Hollywood's Magic Castle) awarded him with The Creative Fellowship in 1991. Only 32 years old at the time, Steinmeyer was the youngest person ever to win The Creative Fellowship. Many people know Steinmeyer best as a researcher and writer of magic history. Some of his more recent written works include Hiding the Elephant (2004), The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, Aka Chung Ling Soo, the "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer" (2005), The Magic of Alan Wakeling: The Works of a Master Magician (2006), and Art and Artifice: And Other Essays of Illusion (2006). For his earlier writings, The Academy of Magical Arts awarded Steinmeyer with the Literary Fellowship Award in 2002. You can read more about Jim Steinmeyer at his web site. See http://www.jimsteinmeyer.com/.

About the Author. Jim Steinmeyer identifies himself on the World Wide Web as "a designer and inventor of illusions and theatrical special effects, for magicians and Broadway shows." Steinmeyer invented and created illusions for Doug Henning, David Copperfield, the Pendragons, Lance Burton, Ricky Jay and others. His best known illusions include Vanishing the Statue of Liberty, Origami Illusion, Hologram Illusion, Interlude, and Walking Through a Mirror. Steinmeyer designed special effects for theatrical shows, such as, Beauty and the Beast, Into the Woods, Mary Poppins, and Phantom of the Opera. The Academy of Magical Arts (Hollywood's Magic Castle) awarded him with The Creative Fellowship in 1991. Only 32 years old at the time, Steinmeyer was the youngest person ever to win The Creative Fellowship. Many people know Steinmeyer best as a researcher and writer of magic history. Some of his more recent written works include Hiding the Elephant (2004), The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, Aka Chung Ling Soo, the "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer" (2005), The Magic of Alan Wakeling: The Works of a Master Magician (2006), and Art and Artifice: And Other Essays of Illusion (2006). For his earlier writings, The Academy of Magical Arts awarded Steinmeyer with the Literary Fellowship Award in 2002. You can read more about Jim Steinmeyer at his web site. See http://www.jimsteinmeyer.com/.

About the Author. Jim Steinmeyer identifies himself on the World Wide Web as "a designer and inventor of illusions and theatrical special effects, for magicians and Broadway shows." Steinmeyer invented and created illusions for Doug Henning, David Copperfield, the Pendragons, Lance Burton, Ricky Jay and others. His best known illusions include Vanishing the Statue of Liberty, Origami Illusion, Hologram Illusion, Interlude, and Walking Through a Mirror. Steinmeyer designed special effects for theatrical shows, such as, Beauty and the Beast, Into the Woods, Mary Poppins, and Phantom of the Opera. The Academy of Magical Arts (Hollywood's Magic Castle) awarded him with The Creative Fellowship in 1991. Only 32 years old at the time, Steinmeyer was the youngest person ever to win The Creative Fellowship. Many people know Steinmeyer best as a researcher and writer of magic history. Some of his more recent written works include Hiding the Elephant (2004), The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, Aka Chung Ling Soo, the "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer" (2005), The Magic of Alan Wakeling: The Works of a Master Magician (2006), and Art and Artifice: And Other Essays of Illusion (2006). For his earlier writings, The Academy of Magical Arts awarded Steinmeyer with the Literary Fellowship Award in 2002. You can read more about Jim Steinmeyer at his web site. See http://www.jimsteinmeyer.com/.

An interesting overview of the development of the stage magician's art around the turn of the twentieth century. Although Steinmeyer reveals a number of the secrets behind famous effects, one of the points he keeps returning to is that the trick itself is secondary to the conjurer's delivery of it. There are some nice anecdotes along these lines, my favourite of which is the recounting of Thurston's method for producing an expression of shocked amazement from children viewing his levitation effect up close.