From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an exuberant biography of the world’s greatest escape artist In 1916, the war in Europe having prevented a tour abroad, Harry Houdini wrote a film treatment for a rollicking motion picture. Though the movie was never made, its title, “The Marvelous Adventures of Houdini: The Justly Celebrated Elusive American,” provides a succinct summary of the Master Mystifier’s life. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, Houdini grew up an impoverished Jewish immigrant in the Midwest and became world-famous thanks to talent, industry, and ferocious determination. He concealed as a matter of temperament and professional ethics the secrets of his sensational success. Nobody knows how Houdini performed some of his dazzling, death-defying tricks, and nobody knows, finally, why he felt compelled to punish and imprison himself over and over again. Must a self-liberator also be a self-torturer? Tracking the restless Houdini’s wide-ranging exploits, acclaimed biographer Adam Begley asks the essential question: What kind of man was this?

Classic study exposing closely-kept professional secrets and revealing, in general terms, the whole art of stage magic. 98 illustrations.

A chance encounter with Harry Houdini leaves a small boy in possession of a mysterious box--one that might hold the secrets to the greatest magic tricks ever performed.

&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RIllusionist, escape artist, movie star, aviator, and spy—Harry Houdini was all these and an international celebrity and the world’s most famous magician. This fascinating biography looks at all the facets of Houdini’s amazing life and includes 21 magic tricks and illusions for a hands-on learning experience. Children will be inspired by this Jewish immigrant who grew up in poverty and, through perseverance and hard work, went on to become one of the most popular and successful entertainers of all time. Houdini was an artist who created his acts carefully, practicing them for years in some cases. He performed such seemingly impossible stunts as escaping several sets of handcuffs and ropes after jumping off a bridge into a flowing river. &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RKids will learn how he devised his most legendary stunts and will also learn the science and logic behind many of Houdini’s acts including his famous milk can escape. Kids can amaze their family and friends with these simple, entertaining, and fun tricks and illusions: &&L/P&&R Stepping through an index card Performing an odd number trick Making a coin appear Mind reading with a secret code Making a magic box Lifting a person with one hand Making a talking board And much more &&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R

Joe Posnanski enters the colorful world of Harry Houdini and his legions of devoted fans to explore the illusionist’s impact on global culture—and why his legacy endures to this day. Nearly a century after Harry Houdini died on Halloween in 1926, he feels as modern and alive as ever. The name Houdini still leaps to mind whenever we witness a daring escape. The baby who frees herself from her crib? Houdini. The dog who vanishes and reappears in the neighbor’s garden? Houdini. Every generation produces new disciples of the magician, from household names in magic like David Copperfield and David Blaine to countless other followers whose lives have been transformed by the power of Houdini. In rural Pennsylvania, a thirteen-year-old girl finds the courage to leave a violent home after learning that Houdini ran away to join the circus; she eventually becomes the first female magician to saw a man in half on television. In Australia, an eight-year-old boy with a learning impediment feels worthless until he sees an old poster of Houdini advertising “Nothing on earth can hold Houdini prisoner,” and begins his path to becoming that nation’s most popular magician. In California, an actor and Vietnam War veteran finds purpose in his life by uncovering the secrets of his hero. But the unique phenomenon of Houdini was always more than his death-defying stunts or his ability to escape handcuffs and straitjackets. It is also about the power of imagination and self-invention. His incredible transformation from Ehrich Weiss, humble Hungarian immigrant and rabbi’s son, into the self-named Harry Houdini has won him a slice of immortality. No one has withstood the test of time quite like Houdini. Fueled by Posnanski’s personal obsession with the magician—and magic itself—The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini is a poignant odyssey of discovery, blending biography, memoir, and first-person reporting to trace Houdini’s metamorphosis into an iconic figure who has inspired millions.

Why are we all so spellbound by ideas of escape - and yet so dismissive of mere escapism? Houdini's Box explores four different escape artists. There is the case history of a little girl who is oddly committed to playing her own wayward version of hide and seek. There is Harry Houdini, the 'Greatest Magician the World has Ever Seen', who electrified the world through a series of death-defying escapes, compulsively re-inventing and re-enacting his own confinement. There is a man who, Jonah-like, is always arriving at the place he was escaping from, who thinks it is his destiny to be in flight, whether from women or from his analyst. And finally the poet Emily Dickinson, who for the last twenty years of her life finds freedom in self-imposed solitary confinement. In this, his most captivating book to date, Adam Phillips reminds us why people often feel most alive in the very moment of escape. But whether we are getting away from something, or getting away with something - as Icarus, or Oedipus, or Narcissus; as victims or tyrants - we cannot describe ourselves without also describing what we need to escape from, and what we want to escape to.

Written by the master magician himself, this fascinating work reveals the secrets behind how Houdini escaped numerous death-defying stunts and exposed a variety of fake spiritualists. He also gives instructions for 44 eye-catching stage tricks, as well as other fascinating material. 155 illustrations.

In this groundbreaking book, renowned magic expert Kalush and bestselling writer Sloman team up to expose Harry Houdinis secret life as a spy, and the stunning plot to murder the magician and destroy his legacy. Photos throughout.

Arnold Arnold is an advanced cross-platform rendering library, or API, used by a number of prominent organizations in film, television, and animation, including Sony Pictures Imageworks. It was developed as a photo-realistic, physically-based ray tracing alternative to traditional scanline based rendering software for CG animation. Arnold uses cutting-edge algorithms that make the most effective use of your computer’s hardware resources: memory, disk space, multiple processor cores, and SIMD/SSE units. The Arnold architecture was designed to easily adapt to existing pipelines. It is built on top of a pluggable node system; users can extend and customize the system by writing new shaders, cameras, filters, and output driver nodes, as well as procedural geometry, custom ray types and user-defined geometric data. The primary goal of the Arnold architecture is to provide a complete solution as a primary renderer for animation and visual effects. However, Arnold can also be used as: A ray server for traditional scanline renderers. A tool for baking/procedural generation of lighting data (lightmaps for videogames). An interactive rendering and relighting tool. Why is Arnold different? Arnold is a highly optimized, unbiased, physically-based 'Monte Carlo' ray/path tracing engine. It doesn't use caching algorithms that introduce artifacts like photon mapping and final gather. It is designed to efficiently render the increasingly complex images demanded by animation and visual effects facilities while simplifying the pipeline, infrastructure requirements and user experience. Arnold provides interactive feedback, often avoiding the need for many render passes and allowing you to match on-set lighting more efficiently. By removing many of the frustrating elements of other renderers, Arnold fits better with your work-flow, produces beautiful, predictable and bias-free results, and puts the fun back into rendering! What is wrong with algorithms like photon mapping or final gather? Such algorithms attempt to cache data that can be re-sampled later, to speed up rendering. However, in doing so, they use up large amounts of memory, introduce intermediate steps that break interactivity, and introduce bias into the sampling that causes visual artifacts. They also require artists to understand the details of how these algorithms work to correctly choose various control settings to get any speed up at all without ruining the render. Worse than that, these settings are almost always affected by other things in the scene, so it's often possible to accidentally use settings for the cache creation/use that make things worse, not better, or that work fine in one situation but are terrible in another, seemingly similar, situation. In short, they are not predictable, other than for very experienced users, and require artists to learn way too much about the algorithms to gain any benefit. We believe that your time is more valuable than your computer's time; why spend an extra 30 minutes working with photon mapping or final gather settings, even if it saves 30 minutes render time (and more often than not it doesn't). That's still 30 minutes not spent modeling, animating or lighting.