An Essay on Magic: On the Nature and Significance of Stage Magic: Volume 3 (The Trilogy of Magic) - Softcover

Neale, Robert E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1517113342 ISBN 13: 9781517113346

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015

Synopsis

From the Recipient of a 2014 Special Fellowship From the Academy of Magical Arts An Essay on Magic is the third installment in Robert E. Neale’s acclaimed Trilogy of Magic. In these pages Bob Neale articulates his important, influential general theory of magic. The theory both explains and celebrates the artful work of magicians by showing how stage magic grows out of everyday human needs and desires. Bob Neale also shows how his theory can help magicians create performances with greater significance and lasting impact. An Essay on Magic also includes thirty-eight of Bob Neale’s highly innovative magic routines, all of which are published here for the first time. Each routine comes with a fully developed presentation. As an extra bonus, this book includes Very Small Worlds—a separate, stand-alone manuscript that develops two new principles for creating astonishing magic with playing cards.

About this title

About the Author:

Bob Neale is a teacher and writer. Throughout his career, he has exercised his imagination by making up things in the overlapping areas of religion, magic, and the arts. The results have been psychological theories about death and dying, religion as mature play, and the relations of loneliness, solitude, and companionship. An understanding of the place of magic in daily life grew out of these explorations. And the expression of it was facilitated by his creation of origami models, puzzles, and tricks that are frequently presented with social, political, and philosophical meanings. He cares about magic as imagination at play in the expression of truth through illusion. Bob is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ with degrees from Amherst College and Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he taught for twenty-four years as Professor of Psychiatry and Religion. His publications during that time include In Praise of Play (1969), The Art of Dying (1973), and Loneliness, Solitude, and Companionship: New Dimensions in Relationship (1984). Bob is an internationally exhibited and published creator of origami models. In 1964, he delighted many paperfolders and magicians with his “Bunny Bill.” In 2009, his impossible object “The Impossi-Bill Braid” gave instruction on construction in both text and DVD. Bob’s essays on magic and tricks have appeared in many journals, pamphlets, and books. He was a monthly columnist for The Linking Ring for five years. His first book for magicians, Tricks of the Imagination (1991), was followed by Magic and Meaning, co-authored with Eugene Burger (1995, now in an expanded, second edition from 2009); Life, Death and Other Card Tricks (2000); The Magic Mirror, co-authored with David Parr (2002); Celebration of Sides: The Nonsense World of Robert Neale, with the assistance of Michael Weber (2006, DVD); This Is Not A Book (2008); Magic Matters (2009); Gift Magic: Performances that Leave People with a Souvenir, with Jeff McBride, George Parker, Lawrence Hass, Eugene Burger, and Rich Bloch (2010); 444 and Three More (2011); and Nine Uneasy Pieces (2012). Between 1998-2000, Bob Neale wrote a trilogy of extended essays that explored in detail the fundamental themes of magic: illusion, wonder, and magic itself. This important trilogy has now been published: The Magic of Celebrating Illusion (2013), The Sense of Wonder (2014), and An Essay on Magic (2015).

About this edition

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1517113342
• ISBN 13: 9781517113346
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 516
• Editor: Hass Ph.D. Lawrence
• Illustrator: Singh Kiva