Reviews and Comments

As a story of growing up, intellectual and emotional maturation, and the development of Self - not to mention as an intense and nearly unbelievable series of life events - this book exceeds almost anything I have read. It's past Angela's Ashes (memoir) or The Color Purple (fiction).

For some reason I can only compare it to the Autobiography of Malcolm X, even though the particulars are so different. (Rural, survivalist, Mormon white girl enters 21st century academia vs. midcentury black hustler enters prison, finds religion, international fame, and disillusionment....) I guess it's the sense that neither book could possibly have been as powerful if it were written any earlier or later in the author's life. It's the narrative about a mind, but one that is inescapably tethered to a specific body and hostile surroundings. It's abstract and still drenched in messy concrete events.

In six months I'll still be grappling with this. Full of wonder.

Short version: Don't be fooled by the book's cool cover art or jacket description. There's no mystery, just name-dropping.

I don't know if the author, editor, or publisher is to blame for presenting the book as a look inside "the52, a secret society of the most innovative performers and creators of illusion, deception, and mystery." That would be an interesting book, but that's not what the actual book is about, and the52 goes unmentioned for whole chapters.

Basically, the journalist Ian Frisch makes friends with some very successful YouTube/Instagram magicians. He's smitten with them, and the luster never wears off, so the bulk of the book is Ian's descriptions of just how freakin' cool these famous and successful people are.

There's no twist, no reveal. I was hoping for something like the documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop, where the viewer realizes partway through that the filmmaker is not in control of what's happening. Nope. Then I was at least expecting some immersion journalism in which the writer shows us a little-known subculture from the inside but then brings some critical perspective. Again, no. It's more like "I always suspected magicians were cool, but now I know THEY ARE SUPER COOL and I'm finally one of them! Although I still look down on the majority of magicians as lame."

That's the other thing. Over and over and over his friends as described as "young guns," "the new generation," shaking up the establishment, etc. They ridicule the stodgy oldtimers. But after finishing the book I still don't know what they're trying to get away from. Top hats and rabbits? Their only genuinely new thing seems to be using social media and personal "branding." OK, fine, those are relatively new concepts, but they simply didn't exist for previous generations so I don't see the substantive difference between old and new.

Here are two quotations that show the narrator's unreliability [but not the entertaining kind of unreliable narrator]:

1) Early in the book, when he's just being introduced to famous magicians, he writes: "I had only heard whispers about the52. Ramsay, right before I came to Blackpool, had cryptically mentioned it: a secret society, founded by Laura London and Daniel Madison, comprising the world's most prominent young magicians, all of whom were pushing the craft forward and doing truly unique things."

Those are not cryptic whispers. That's a complete, thorough description. The only twist we learn later in the book is that it's not really a secret society, since members post photos of their induction tattoos on Instagram.

2) Later, at a magic convention in Buffalo, he attempts to contrast the oldtimers with the brash young innovators. "The older guys mostly kept to themselves, rehashing experiences from memories past or immodestly showing each other moves that had been invented decades ago." Literally two sentences later: "Xavior [a member of the52] held court at a corner table and showed a small crowd his work on Raise Rise, an effect invented and made famous back in the 1990s," i.e. decades ago.

Frisch includes chapters about his childhood and parents, which are actually quite touching and subtle. I don't think his personal story arc complements or resonates with the main themes of magic as much as he thinks it does. Other chapters on the history of magic are interesting but that topic has been covered better elsewhere.

I don't think I learned anything about strategy. The book does seem to be an outstanding example of hindsight bias (or maybe survivorship bias?): Gaddis's exemplars of good strategy (Octavian, Elizabeth I, Franklin Roosevelt and a few others) all seem to have muddled through challenges/wars as best they could and ultimately prevailed - otherwise, Gaddis would not have picked them. The exemplars of flawed strategies (Xerxes, Philip I, Napoleon) were also exceptionally successful people who did their best in wars, until they lost in the end, which the book argues was due to their flawed strategies. But correlation is not causation. When Queen Elizabeth balked at making certain decisions, Gaddis calls it clever "dithering" that ultimately achieved a larger purpose; when Napoleon did the same thing, Gaddis calls it indecision or paralysis. I didn't see any real, qualitative difference between the two leaders - just luck and hindsight.

Anyway, the book is still an enjoyable skip through history, from ancient Greece through World War II. It lucidly illustrates Isaiah Berlin's distinction between hedgehogs (leaders with one big idea that organizes all their actions no matter what) and foxes (leaders who juggle or switch between ideas as the the circumstances change). Gaddis says good strategy means doing both, or in his words, "a fox with a compass." That seems like an obvious cop-out, but okay. But how are we to know when lean one way or the other? Are there some rules of thumb? When should theory guide us, vs. anecdotal experiences? Gaddis gives no firm, falsifiable answers, probably because there are none. And yet the premise of his book is that there are right ways and wrong ways to make these decisions. I suspect the solution is to die before you screw up - like FDR, and unlike Napoleon.

In short, a fun historical read but it talks in circles.