Product Description

Revealing new insights, this ground-breaking book vividly recreates Houdini's solitarian 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 deceased 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.

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"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

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1630289 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 108 pages

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Customer Reviews

Should be considered mandatory reading
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 after life 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. Also available in a hardcover edition (9781425767433, $79.99) "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.

Houdini Lecture
Houdini's career was going into a slump as he approached 50. His escapes were becoming too strenuous for him and the audiences had become jaded regarding his "death-defying" feats. Vaudeville itself was suffering from increasing competition from radio and the movies. Houdini then, like other magicians, switched to exposing fraudulent spirit mediums for half of his show in order to bring in paying audiences.
Like magician and non-magician exposers from the beginning of the Spiritualist movement in 1848, the stage exposures were often the performer's version of what happened, not an actual exposure under the same conditions as in the seance room. The audiences for the most part had never been to a seance and so accepted the performer's statements as likely true.
For all of Houdini's loudly declared animosity toward fraudulent mediums and how he only wanted to save the "defenseless gullible public" from the fraud, Houdini needed the mediums to bring in the paying audience -- consequently he could not risk actually shutting down the mediums, only antagonizing and publicizing them.
Arthur Moses has performed a real service to magic and spiritualist history in publishing the slides and patter used by Houdini in his lectures. Moses also provides a potted biography of Houdini as background. The book is well illustrated with a good introductory bibliography.
The Moses note on Slide 19, however, is incorrect regarding Stuart Cumberland. Charles Garner was not apprenticed to Washington Irving Bishop (he worked as secretary for Bishop for about six weeks before Bishop left for Malta). Garner learned the muscle-reading act on his own after having seen the money that Bishop was making. He then took a more socially euphonious name,Stuart Charles Francis Cumberland, and went on to make over five million dollars as a mind reader, journalist and author. Cumberland was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1887.
Cumberland did perform medium exposures along the lines of Houdini et al, and was embarrassed on more than one occasion when he could not explain the phenomena, resorting to fairly limp explanations that were publicly disputed by others present. He failed to expose A. H. Philips, the first medium he took on when he came to New York for the first time in 1881 when two reporters from two different NY papers he had taken with him claimed that Cumberland had not in fact exposed anything.
Cumberland died February, 1922, two years after the photograph in the slide was taken at the stage door of the London Palladium. Dr. Irving was a dentist from Australia, and an avid lover of magic.
On the whole, a useful book.

Perfect book for Houdini fans
I have read few bíographies about Houdini. This one I bought because of lantern slide photos it represent, Houdini used these lantern slides in his lectures about spiritualism. All the pictures in this book are perfect, interesting and beautiful (if I may use word beautiful when talking about Houdini...). Addition to lantern slides there are more photos, copies of handbills etc. Nice work.