Tricks By David Ben

Tricks con­tains mate­r­ial for all skill-levels, from tech­ni­cally demand­ing ren­di­tions of the “Cards to Pocket” and “Open Trav­el­ers” to self-working “Faux Automata” using cel­lu­lar phones and lap­top com­put­ers. In between, close up mir­a­cles, par­lor tricks and stage effects abound. Stand­out effects include “Postage Pre­dic­tion,” a no-nonsense men­tal effect with postage stamps; “Bad Habits,” an improved, log­i­cal ver­sion of the “Cig­a­rette Through Quar­ter” plot; and “Match­less Psy­chom­e­try,” an up-to-date ver­sion of Annemann’s clas­sic “Pseudo-Psychometry.”

Ben has also revealed the inner-workings behind selec­tions from his acclaimed the­atri­cal pro­duc­tions The Con­juror and The Conjuror’s Suite. Tricks also includes the per­for­mance scripts for these effects — giv­ing the reader a com­plete view of how a sea­soned pro­fes­sional devel­ops mate­r­ial for the real world.

Within these pages you will gain insight into a host of mir­a­cles that David Ben has made his liv­ing with for the last 20 years. Detailed are not only the rudi­ments of each effect, but also the select secrets only avail­able to a work­ing pro­fes­sional who has per­formed a trick hun­dreds, if not thou­sands, of times. Inside, you’ll find the tricks behind Tricks.

Review:
David Ben is Ross Bertrams only pro­tege, and has won crit­i­cal acclaim in his home town of Toronto with his pre­sen­ta­tions of par­lour magic. This book con­tains a col­lec­tion of mate­r­ial from Bens work­ing reper­toire cov­er­ing card, coin, men­tal­ism, credit cards, bot­tle tops and much much more. If you dis­count the over exu­ber­ant “com­pared to Paul Har­ris’ leg­endary set Art of Aston­ish­ment” this may be one of those instances where the blurb matches the reality.

The mate­r­ial is strong and the pro­duc­tion value of the book is great with well writ­ten expla­na­tions, his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tives and solid illus­tra­tions. There really is a lot of good mate­r­ial in this book. My per­sonal favourites being:

Worse Habits: A very nice impromptu bar top cup and ball. With­out the cup or the ball. (I’m keep­ing this in reserve for any future cup and ball com­pe­ti­tion.)
Scarne-Bertram Pre­dic­tion: An expla­na­tion of an impos­si­ble pre­dic­tion per­formed by Scarne on tele­vi­sion in the 50s.
Card on Ceil­ing: The clas­sic effect using a Bertram handling.

How­ever, there is one prob­lem with this book. With the wide vari­ety of effects and the wide vari­ety of skill lev­els required it is dif­fi­cult to see who the tar­get mar­ket is. If your a begin­ner you will find a good range of effects but you may not have the skills to per­form them. In addi­tion, David makes heavy use of ref­er­ences so if your magic library isn’t up to scratch then you will have prob­lems fol­low­ing some of the expla­na­tion. If your more advanced then the wide range of effects implies a lack of depth and there­fore may disappoint.

On reflec­tion, this is a book for the advanced per­former who has a cre­ative streak. I found the mate­r­ial very inter­est­ing and it kicked off a num­ber of ideas for explo­ration. Although there are effects that you may add to your day to day rou­tine, I think its real value is as cre­ative source material.

Over­all:
This is a great source of ideas and pro­vides insight into another cre­ative per­form­ers process. If you actively cre­ate your own effects, you’ll get a great deal out of this book. If your a begin­ner then be warned, there are lots of good effects here, but some will be too advanced or you won’t have the appro­pri­ate ref­er­ence mate­r­ial. Its still a darn good col­lec­tion, though.

Effects: 8/10
Qual­ity: 8/10
Value For Money: 8/10

this review was orig­i­nally pub­lished at Talk­magic Reviews

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