Word: houdini
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...black musician turns violent revolutionary after his new Model T is vandalized by jealous whites. Harry Houdini, the immortal escape artist, cannot slip from his mother's apron strings. He is also a man incapable of political thought because, in Doctorow's moving phrase, "he could not reason from his own hurt feelings...
...Houdini of British politics has been cornered before, however, and may yet find a way out of his latest troubles. According to the most recent Gallup poll, British pro-Market sentiment is still strong: 60% plan to vote yes on the referendum, 29% no, and 11% are undecided. Moreover, most Tories will join the Prime Minister in plumping for a vote to stay within the EEC. A referendum victory would strengthen Wilson's hand to the point that most of his Labor adversaries would be forced to close ranks behind him again, if only begrudgingly. But the gravity...
...elephant disappear, sawing a woman in eighths), later perfected the mind-reading act that made him famous. Among the brains Dunninger picked were those of six Presidents and such luminaries as Thomas Edison and Pope Pius XII, who temporarily baffled him by thinking in Latin. Like his friend Houdini, Dunninger was a debunker of occult phenomena who modestly assessed his own skills: "Any three-year-old could do it -with 30 years' practice...
...plot? Does one tattle on Sherlock Holmes? No. But yes, there is a beauteous lady in distress, purloined papers, low, seedy minicriminals, velvety London fogs, the claustrophobic peril of a sealed gas chamber and Holmes' agile Houdini-like escape from it. Over everything lurks the brooding presence of Moriarty, played by Philip Locke like a Mephistophelean raven of evil...
Chop-Chop Cups. The conjurers had forgotten that their heroes were also afflicted with nostalgia, that Houdini himself had borrowed his name from an earlier performer, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a 19th century French prestidigitator. Moreover, as the magicians should have known, scientists are the easiest to fool. They seek rational explanations for contrived phenomena, connections where none exist. Magicians were in fact doing what they had always persuaded their audiences to do: they were looking the wrong way. "We magicians are notorious for staring in the rear-view mirror," says Semipro Charles Reynolds, picture editor of Popular...