Title: Mayhew What Women Want
Author: John Lovick
Publicist: Hermetic Press Inc
Photographed by: Rick Anderson
Link: http://www.murphysmagic.com/Product.aspx?id=52918
Retail Price: $40.00
Reading Difficulty: Moderate to Difficult
Notes: All card material from the mind of Steve Mayhew
Features:
? Hard Cover
? Over 280 pages of material
? Illustrated & Photographed
When I saw a book titled ?Mayhew What Women Want? and the front cover illustration is one picture of a woman?s shoe with the word ?no? below it and a magician levitating a Queen of Hearts from a fan with the word ?yes? under it I thought to myself: ?What a load of pretentious bull****. Because that?s what women everywhere in this world want: some random guy walking up to them trying to pick them up doing cheesy card tricks in an effort to get their numbers or into their pants. I was fully prepared to read a book on cheesy bar magic, one lines, come ons, and pick up attempts thinly veiled as magic tricks. Then the name caught my attention. Mayhew. As in Steve Mayhew, and the joy and excitement of having a good product in my hot little hands once again flooded my heart.
Steve Mayhew, if you aren?t familiar with his work, is one of the modern card gods among card workers. His performances are fun, funny, entertaining, and pack one hell of a punch. Enough so that he?s fooled even a good number of magicians before in his day. Overlooking Lovick?s pretentious title what you have is a book packed cover to cover with some of the funniest, fun, and hard hitting card tricks you?ve ever seen.
This book isn?t for the beginner though. This book assumes the reader has at the least a comprehensive understanding and firm foundation in the fundamentals of card magic. So a lot of the moves used to execute the tricks described in the book are just described as their known names and not how to do them. Example would be grip the top card and perform a double lift, as opposed to teaching you how to do a double lift. Also there?s some material in this book that is just plain hard. Don?t let that discourage you though. All the material in this book is highly original and hits hard.
Lovick?s writing style is easy enough to read and the book is one you?ll be able to plow through in short time. There?s a lot of solid material ranging from ace productions, triumph, gambling demos, dealing demos, a money trick, and an entire chapter dedicated to magic tricks designed to fool magicians. There?s enough material in here to keep you working for a long time.
Just to highlight a few of my favorite tricks:
Das Kapital: A brilliant $100 dollar bill switch with some great comedic lines and call backs. Three individual mini routines that can stand alone or be combined into one masterful presentation.
Tacoma Opener: A magician fooling take on the Chicago Opener run through a Mayhew filter.
Dribble Down Pass: Mayhew?s handling on a powerful utility move.
Hungry Now: A really nice sandwich effect that buries the two red aces into the deck, a selected card is dropped on the deck and appears between the two red aces.
Labyrinth Blackjack: One of the best Blackjack gambling games I?ve ever seen. The spectator deals out five hands of BlackJack to himself and you. You allow them to hit or stand where ever they want, you can even allow them to cheat and you still win every time!
My overall impression of this book was a very good one. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in adding in powerful card tricks into their working show. I was delightfully impressed by the time I finished the book.
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH: Just get the book already! You won?t be sorry.
When I give my product scores below I am measuring them on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 Being absolute the worst score possible, and 10 being the absolute best, making a score of five average. The four points that I grade upon is Product Quality, Teaching Quality, Readability and Overall Quality.
Product Quality: 8
Good price for excellent material. This is not a beginners book, but for anyone with a basic foundation in card magic this is a hell of a find.
Teaching Quality: 5
Lovick doesn?t really teach so much as he describes what to do. There isn?t a lot of pictures or illustrations and if the move isn?t original to Mayhew Lovick doesn?t bother to do much more than tell you where you can learn it. This could be frustrating for someone who doesn?t have a large library of magic books or a good grasp on the basics.
Readability: 9
Lovick?s writing style is humorous and easy to read. He is very engaging.
Over All Quality: 8
This is a good example of not judging a book by its cover. The material in here is powerful. Any card worker would love to add these routines to their repertoire.