MJM Eugene Burger: from Beyond by Lawrence HASS and Eugene Burger - Book

What can I say...It is a Eugene Burger book. I have several of his works and love his writing style, his presentation of tricks, and I always found him to be one of the easiest to follow masters of magic. My only complain is that God took him from us.

For those lucky enough to see Eugene Burger perform live, or even in video, you will know that his voice and manner are 90% of the magic. Reading this book, you also get his incredible sense of magic theory and philosophy, as well as the secrets to many of his most memorable tricks. You can't help but read the sections he wrote or the interviews with him in his deep voice. He truly does come back to us, however briefly, as we read this magical book. Lawrence Hass has brought us real magic here, and insured that this great magician will live forever. Worth every penny.

If you were to ask me to name my favorite magician or magic scholar, I probably wouldn't be able to answer. If, however, you asked me to name my top five, I guarantee that Eugene Burger would always make the list. Both as a performer and as a scholar and teacher of magic, his work has influenced almost everything I've ever done in magic. I was severely saddened when I heard the news of his death in 2017, but I was excited when I learned some months later that his longtime friend and collaborator Lawrence Hass was preparing a book of the great master's previously unpublished works. This is that book, and I consider it required reading for magicians.Reading the book was a bittersweet experience. While it was Eugene's wish that it should be a collection of his works and not a memorial, one can't help but regard this posthumous collection as a significant piece of his legacy. Reading Eugene's scripts, one can't help but to "hear" them in his voice, making reading this book a lot like a visitation by a great man from beyond the grave.The material itself is a mixed bag, but all of it comes across like classic Eugene Burger. Some of the routines collected in this volume will be familiar to long-time fans of Eugene's work. His "Shotglass Surprise," for instance, has seen print elsewhere, as has his Gypsy Thread routine. However, the detailed treatments in this volume clarify some of the trickier points and serve as the final word on the subject. Even more exciting, the book contains several previously unpublished routines, including Eugene's genius handling of the spirit slates.Though the bulk of the text was actually written by Lawrence Hass rather than Eugene Burger, this book will certainly please any fan of Burger's work. Magicians of all stripes will find much of value in these pages and those of us who have been longtime fans of his work will find this to be both a fascinating collection of new material and a fitting tribute to one of the greatest magicians of the last century.