Karl Johnson’s Vernon Book Touted – FinallyInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

Today’s edition of The Los Angeles Times has its review of The Magician and the Cardsharp The Search for America’s Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist.

We loved the book and reviewed it right after it became available at our local bookstore / library. Library for us, bookstore for suckers.

Finally, there is a critic appreciative of the skill, technique and
artistry required to manipulate cards for gambling or performance.

YOU won’t realize this until you start trying, but
manipulating a simple deck of cards is as hard as mastering an oboe.
Among the many virtues of Karl Johnson’s “The Magician and the
Cardsharp,” with its prodigious research and compelling settings and
characters, is that it conveys the allure of playing cards and the
singular focus required to learn to manipulate them. At its heart, it
is a tale of art and obsession.

The critic approves
of the portrait of Dai Vernon as “the 20th century’s most influential
performer of magic, responsible in large measure for its conversion
from huge stage simulations of the supernatural to table-top
demonstrations of sleight of hand.”

He even correctly identifies the central premise of Mr. Vernon’s
philosophy toward magic. “He emphasized naturalness achieved by
prodigious skill, the result of thousands of hours of practice. Johnson
rightly places Vernon’s achievement in the context of art history,
particularly that of Impressionist painting and jazz music.”

Mr. Vernon’s place in the history of magic parallels magic’s place in America during the Jazz Age.

[The] narrative oscillates from New York magic circles
where Vernon rubbed shoulders with legends such as Max Malini, Nate
Leipzig and Harry Houdini to the world of vice in Pleasant Hill and
Kansas City.

There, jazz was exploding along with gambling, and Count Basie and
Bill Kennedy honed their chops simultaneously. When these worlds
collide, Vernon and his prot?g? Charlie Miller almost get killed
walking into the wrong rooms and asking after the card mechanic with
the impossible move.

The story climaxes when Vernon tracks Kennedy to his home and learns
the center deal. Vernon and Kennedy never meet again, and as Kennedy
declines into alcoholism, Vernon becomes the personification of
conjuring for generations of magicians, holding forth into his and the
20th century’s 90s at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

The L.A. Times critic cryptically observes in conclusion, “[t]hat
Vernon cared so much about something so essentially useless is his
illumination of art and of the human condition, of our inspiring or sad
ability or need to make something unnecessary into the meaning of a
life.”

We are pleased to see the book receive the type of review it and its subject deserves.

You can read our review here.

…

Today’s edition of The Los Angeles Times has its review of The Magician and the Cardsharp The Search for America’s Greatest Sleight-of-Hand Artist.

We loved the book and reviewed it right after it became available at our local bookstore / library. Library for us, bookstore for suckers.

Finally, there is a critic appreciative of the skill, technique and
artistry required to manipulate cards for gambling or performance.

YOU won’t realize this until you start trying, but
manipulating a simple deck of cards is as hard as mastering an oboe.
Among the many virtues of Karl Johnson’s “The Magician and the
Cardsharp,” with its prodigious research and compelling settings and
characters, is that it conveys the allure of playing cards and the
singular focus required to learn to manipulate them. At its heart, it
is a tale of art and obsession.

Mr. Vernon’s place in the history of magic parallels magic’s place in America during the Jazz Age.

[The] narrative oscillates from New York magic circles
where Vernon rubbed shoulders with legends such as Max Malini, Nate
Leipzig and Harry Houdini to the world of vice in Pleasant Hill and
Kansas City.

There, jazz was exploding along with gambling, and Count Basie and
Bill Kennedy honed their chops simultaneously. When these worlds
collide, Vernon and his prot?g? Charlie Miller almost get killed
walking into the wrong rooms and asking after the card mechanic with
the impossible move.

The story climaxes when Vernon tracks Kennedy to his home and learns
the center deal. Vernon and Kennedy never meet again, and as Kennedy
declines into alcoholism, Vernon becomes the personification of
conjuring for generations of magicians, holding forth into his and the
20th century’s 90s at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles.