Wednesday, July 27, 2005

The Glorious Deception

DQ reader Alex Corvino recently recommended a book to me titled The Glorious Deception: The Double Life of William Robinson, aka Chung Ling Soo, the "Marvelous Chinese Conjurer".

It is, in a word, fascinating. It's the story of William Robinson, an American magician who assumed a new personae as the world's greatest Chinese magician. It's a bizarre story--Robinson's life contained multiple layers of deception--and it makes for excellent reading. It's also a general history of the world's leading magicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

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