Dr Leon's Magic World - My Review

I just bought a Mandarin-version magic book written by Hiro Sakai which is a Japanese magician.

For those of you who have been in the art of magic for quite some time, I think you may familiar with Hiro Sakai as he has been creating many magic effects in the past which you could find them in Harry Lorayne's "Apocalypse", Steve Beam's magazines and others.

This book is actually catered for beginner or intermediate magician and I bought this book is because Hiro Sakai is my idol. Best of all, this book also comes with a 100-Minute DVD which I thought would certainly add value in your learning. I have studied quite a number of his brilliant items in Steve Beam's magazines which I thought truly awesome. In this book, I found quite a number of interesting items as well. I will list out my favourite items in this book but allow me to walk you through the essential information in this book.

This book has 111 pages and with a foreword by Lu Chen. I am certainly certain that many of you will quite familiar with this Taiwanese magician.

I am not going to relate more in depths about him perhaps in my next review would be on his awesome DVD. The content of this book is divided into 5 sections. These sections are categorised as Card, Money, Handkerchief, Basic object and Parlour Magic.

You may ask, perhaps this book is catered for beginner, are the materials interesting? I believe you will find something of interest and as you know, Hiro Sakai is now a big name in the world of magic. According to this book, his next move is to conquer China with his magic. Without further ado, I will review some of my favourite items in this book.

Card Magic

• The Mystery of the A & K

This is a wonderful routine and immediately this goes to my repertoire. This is a hands-off approach where the magician does not touch the deck and the spectator would be able to find the four Aces and Kings by merely cutting and dealing out the cards making four piles on the table. The cutting sequence which I thought very cunning and effective!

Money Magic

• Miracle Illusion

I think this item is "worth" the price of this book. Basically, the magician causes two paper notes to penetrate each other visually. When I watched this, I am thinking of Andrew Mayne's "Ghost Bills". In Sakai-san 's version, you need to have a gimmick bill in order to perform this which you can make or prepare in less than 1 minute.

I listed the two items above are my personal favourites. I am sure perhaps you will find even more favourite items in this book. You will find other excellent items such as producing a bottle of champagne out from an empty paper bag, producing a mobile phone from your shoe, causing a signed-coin to appear in a sealed teabag which everything can be examined, and many other nice impromptu magic.

The only comment that I would like to make is, I am actually hoping that each of the effects or routines would be properly cited or credited in terms of providing the sources or the originator. However, Sakai-san did mention (at the "Introduction" section) there were two effects which independently created; the first one "Miracle Illusion" belongs to him and the other "Magazine Trick" which belongs to his friend.

Other items (classical tricks) I could not find the credit sources which I thought something lack of. In my opinion, I think this book could do better in terms of providing all the respective information to the readers whether the particular effect they learn is based on a classical magic and the originator must be made known. This allows the readers know (even they are beginners) and truly understand the world of magic even more in depths.

Overall, I really like this book very much as some of the items are interesting perhaps Sakai-san did enhance some of the effects but he did not make known in the book. If you are a beginner in magic, I urge you to get this book and at the same time, you may watch and learn how Sakai-san performs in a real-life situation.

Highly recommended!

ALSH