Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic? - Hardcover

Jonathan Margolis is a well known journalist and author of five successful showbusiness biographies.

Geller has attracted considerable attentionAand inspired considerable skepticismAbecause of his evident abilities to bend metal, read minds, and find things. In his authorized biography of Geller, Margolis, a European contributor to Time and the author of biographies like Cleese Encounters, sets out to discover whether Geller is a magician performing through sleight of hand and misdirection or genuinely a man of mysticism and paranormal powers. He thoroughly traces Geller's lifeAfrom his birth in Budapest, through childhood in Israel, to his adulthood (all over the world)Aand draws on interviews with prominent magicians, illusionists, and skeptics to assess Geller's feats. In the final chapter, Margolis comes to some conclusions but offers nothing decisive about the source of Geller's powers. Engagingly written, this book will be a popular addition to public library collections. Geller's own Mind Medicine is another matter. According to Andrew Weil (who wrote the book's foreword), this is the work of a man who has moved beyond performing feats of psychic wonder to become a mature and thoughtful healer. In this compendium of history, psychology, exercises, and self-help advice, Geller argues that anyone can use the power of his or her mind to cure illnesses and psychoses. He provides many interesting and effective exercises to discipline the mind and harness its healing powers, but much of what he says about alternative therapies is dubious, if not mistaken. And while his suggested exercises are helpful, he breaks no new ground here. Other books, such as Rudolph Ballentine's Radical Healing (LJ 1/99), provide more challenging information and suggestions for combining alternative therapies with conventional medicine. Recommended with reservations for collections on meditation and alternative healing.AGail Wood, SUNY Coll. of Technology Lib., Cortland
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