Houdini Speaks Out: "I am Houdini! And you are a fraud!"

NEWLY REVISED 2014 EDITION - Harry Houdini became celebrated for the spectacular ways that he performed magic, stage illusions, and escapes. Attaining fame and heroism that most could only dream of, Houdini was embraced by the public as if he were their protector. A rampant pall of Spiritualism was cast over much of America and throughout the Western world. He was yearning to make contact to the ''afterlife'' to speak again with his own deceased mother. It was a paradox he would never understand; he could escape from every challenge set before him and made illusion appear as fact, yet he could not reach through to the departed. Houdini's own transformation was from magician to escape artist to Spiritualist debunker. His career professed trickery as long as it was for entertainment; it was when mediums pronounced their work as truth that he made it his passion to expose them as frauds. Revealing new insights, this ground-breaking updated edition vividly recreates Houdini's debunking lectures which he presented from 1922 until his untimely death in 1926. The reader becomes involved in understanding his struggles to reach into the afterlife to contact his late mother during an era filled with deceptive spirit mediums. Each of the fifty glass lantern slides that Houdini used to highlight his lectures are painstakingly recreated and matched to his original lecture text. • "HOUDINI SPEAKS OUT reveals that Houdini was more than magic and escapes. Houdini´s passion to fight fraudulent spiritualists consumed his final years" David Copperfield • "Harry Houdini is a legendary stage magician whose legacy and influence have served to inspire practitioners of legerdemain down to the present day. Although very well known as a magician and as an escape artist, over time people have largely forgotten that he was also a believer in an afterlife and an exposure of fraudulent mediums who tended to prey on a gullible public. "Houdini Speaks Out: "I am Houdini! And you are a fraud!" by Arthur Moses recreates Houdini's 'solitarian' lectures which he gave from 1922 to his unexpected and early death in 1926. Each of the fifty glass lantern slides he used to highlight his lectures are recreated and carefully matched to his original lecture text. "Houdini Speaks Out" is a very strongly recommended addition to personal, professional, academic, and community library collections -- and should be considered mandatory reading by anyone with an interest in spiritualism, magic, and the occult." Midwest Book Review