Dai Vernon: A Biography also details the evolution of magic in the 20th century. From the stages of London and Paris to the back rooms of magic emporiums where secrets were bought and sold, Vernon's life and work escort the reader through vaudeville, Broadway theaters, grand magic spectaculars, New York nightspots and the dawn of television. Here, cornerstones of the craft have finally been laid bare for all to see.
Read about and discover the father of 20th century close-up magic for yourself.
Dai Vernon: the last great undiscovered artist of the 20th century.
His medium was magic and with it, Vernon turned the clandestine world of conjuring on its ear with virtuoso sleight-of-hand and a dogged pursuit for perfection.
Born in 1894 in Ottawa, the son of a Canadian civil servant, Vernon moved to New York - Manhattan - in 1915, and never looked back. Miracles flowed from his fingertips - effortlessly. The source of his secrets? The underworld and the gamblers, hustlers and con-men that roamed back-room dens of iniquity, bunked in jail cells and walked the streets of America. Vernon sought them out, befriended them, and made their work, their covert methods, his. This book, the first in-depth examination of Vernon's life, traces the first half of his remarkable journey - through Ottawa, Coney Island, Chicago, Manhattan, Kansas City and Colorado Springs - and the celebrities - Houdini, Billy Rose, and Roosevelt, that Vernon encountered along the way.
http://www.ellusionist.com/order/Dai-Vernon-Biography-David-Ben.php?
Bear in mind when reading my review that I totally have the hots for Dai Vernon and find all I know about him (which admittedly isn't very much) to be awesome, so my review may be slightly biased.
With that said, this book is just so good. It took me about a day and a half to get through the 350 or so pages; I just couldn't put the book down even if I wanted to (though again how much of this was due to the book actually being very good or to my perverse fascination with Vernon, I don't know).
The book covers the years 1894 to 1941 and covers in detail Vernon's childhood years, his first encounters with magic, his obsessive strive to learn and master everything about magic and his adult years, when he really revolutionised magic.
There was a great story in the book of when Dai was still a young kid he memorised the locations of a group of cards that had been thrown to the side of the railway tracks on his way to school, and then he waited patiently for weeks for one of his friends to point to the cards and say "if you were a real magician you could tell me what that card is." That small story really inspired me to go grab a deck of cards and immediately start fiddling with it.
I really liked this book. The writing was a bit clumsy at parts but it didn't matter to me. I would recommend this to everyone, especially to people interested in card magic. 10/10, easily.
