Unabridged Audiobook
A very long time ago, I was a young magician. Like everyone else who entered that field, I developed a fascination with Houdini. The problem with stories about Houdini is that, nearly 100 years after his death, it is almost impossible to separate the legends about the man from the man himself. The truth is usually buried under the massive artifice created about the man--much of it created by Houdini himself. This is a legendary story, and one that has never been fully told until this book. Traces of the story have appeared in several films about the man--each, frankly worse than the ones that preceded it--and were usually either glossed over or used to create some odd, fanciful love story. The truth is so much more complicated and more fascinating that all the fictional retellings. The psychological battle between Mina Crandon and Houdini was an extraordinary one. And who came out on top can still be a matter of some debate. Putting the battle into the context of the rise of Spiritualism in the early 20th Century, Jaher does an excellent of job of untangling the threads of an extremely complicated story. At times it reads like a mystery. At times, like a ghost story. At times a story about how greed, sex and egos came extremely close to derailing a scientific study, and how easy it can be for those "searching for truth" to become corrupted. And Margery...(Mina)...for decades she's been a kind of ghost, herself. In legend, she seems to cease to exist the moment Houdini exits the stage. No one else has ever bothered to answer the question "What happened next?" This story makes her real. A complicated woman with extraordinary skill and courage, and a brazen ability to find a way to thwart almost every test condition set for her. She was ahead of her time. In some ways, I admire her. In spite of the fact that she was a fraud. She was, perhaps the greatest fraud spiritualism ever produced. Had she chosen to become a magician instead of a medium, she would have been a way better one that Houdini ever was.
~~tag-text~~