Author: Nate Staniforth

Normally when I finish a book, I let it sit a while before coming back to write a review. It’s kind of a spaced repetition technique to help me remember the finer points that stood out.

Not this one.

I had to write this right away because this is the best damned book I’ve read in the past five years. I don’t say that lightly either, especially when you consider the volume at which I read.

First, my history with Nate Staniforth.

Nate is a professional magician from Iowa and he doesn’t know me personally, or at all. I saw a clip of him over fifteen years ago on Ellusionist performing a card trick and liked him instantly. The guy just exuded authenticity and he comes across as one of those people you instantly like the moment you meet them.

Then I bought his DVD, Spellbinder, and it’s one of the very few DVDs I still kept after doing my great purging of physical mediums.

In this DVD, Nate was touching upon something that had nagged at me as an early magician – how can you give the audience a sense of wonder with magic as your medium?

How can you get the audience to be participants in the magic and feel it as authentic without you (the magician) pretending to be a real wizard? You see, I wanted to do magic because I loved the awe of the universe.

I wanted people to see magic as an art.

And like any art, the goal is to dig into the well of human emotion and experience. To bring forward what we spend every day trying to suppress or to name something we could never put our finger on.

I didn’t want people to see magic as nothing more than cheap parlour tricks and Nate and I seemed to be on the same wavelength about it.

That’s when I became a fan.

He sparked an inner dialogue that got me thinking about magic in a different way, to connect it to other parts of my life, to write an article about it on Tommy|Zor that got the attention of Chris Kenner (David Copperfield’s executive producer) – who called me up about it and we chatted for an hour on the nature of magic as an art – to speaking at an Ignite Culture event, to even writing a novella (to be published in the near future) with this dialogue running through my subconscious.

My early readers told me it was the best writing I’ve ever done and one of my partners in eVw said I need to make a series out of it… and he hates everything.

I haven’t even gotten to the book, but you might be able to see why I loved it so much. It was personal.

Deeply personal.

Nate pursued his passion with the upmost ferocity and I shifted to writing while bowing out of the magic world. In doing so, much of that drive I had, the philosophical underpinnings of being a magician, went dormant.

With it, if I’m being honest, went some of my spark of life.

Then one night recently, my longing for that world again tapped me on the shoulder and I found this book.

It is the journey of Nate trying to find that real sense of wonder, burning out as a performer and discovering some hard truths about magic as an art on a purposeful trip to India (a country desperately trying to rid itself of its image as a land full of magic and mystery).

Nate is honest and you feel that honesty come out in every sentence.

I powered through this book, clutching on to every word while reading late into the night and waking up early to finish as before my kids woke up. It woke up that part of me that went dormant, bringing life back to something so close to my inner being.

It got me connecting my former life as a magician to my life as a teacher right now. You see, a good teacher isn’t someone who is passionate about their subject area – they’re passionate about sharing that subject with others.

A good magician is the same way. They don’t love magic – they love sharing it with others.

That’s what makes someone love a teacher.

That’s what makes someone love a magician.

That’s what makes someone love another person.

While it could read as a memoir (albeit a very good one), if you’re open to the possibility of wonder, Nate will share with you what he’s learned and you won’t be disappointed.

There’s so much to be gained if you keep your eyes open.