A wondrous memoir about astonishment and its importance in everyday life from magician Nate Staniforth, former host of the Discovery Channel's hit TV show, "Breaking Magic."
Nate Staniforth has spent most of his life and all of his professional career trying to understand wonder--what it is, where to find it, and how to share it with others. He became a magician because he learned at a young age that magic tricks don 't have to be frivolous. Magic doesn't have to be about Lycra, sequins, and smoke machines--rather, it can create a moment of genuine astonishment.
The paradox, though, is that the better you get at creating wonder for other people with magic, the harder and harder it gets to experience yourself. A magic trick isn 't amazing when you know the secret, and after years on the road as a young professional magician, crisscrossing the country and performing four or five nights a week, every week, Nate knew most of the secrets. He was disillusioned, burned out, and ready to quit.
Instead, he went to India to search for magic. Here Is Real Magic follows Nate Staniforth's evolution from an obsessed young magician to a disillusioned wanderer, and tells the story of his rediscovery of astonishment--and the importance of wonder in everyday life--during his trip to the slums of India, where he infiltrated a 3,000-year-old clan of street magicians and regained his ability to experience wonder in the world. Here Is Real Magic is a call to all of us--to welcome astonishment back into our lives, to seek wonder in the everyday, and to find magic (yes, real magic) all around us.
