Young Writers Society

Entertainer Derren Brown has been mucking with people for channel 4 since about 2001 with his tv show ‘Trick of the Mind’ and its all been jolly good fun to watch. Now he’s got a book out, ‘Tricks of the Mind’ which I picked up over Christmas. Just thought I’d tell you what I thought of it.
It all starts of rather promising, Derren introducing himself, what he does and the whole ethos to his work. His writing style is great, humourous and full of interesting anecdotes throughout. Then he goes into the nitty gritty with the first of six chapters. Magic. He gives you some details on some simple tricks, tells you how to do them and the philosophy of magic and how magicians make it so that even though you know it’s a trick, you’ll most likely never figure out how the heck they did it.

Next up is memory, which is the chapter I enjoyed the most. He tells you how to remember long lists of items (even a month after I can still recall and recite:

Sausage
Telephone
Monkey
Button
Book
Cabbage
Glass
…
…
And so on and so forth for 13 more random words.
Then he goes on to techniques for serious memory buffs, with mind palaces, coding your pin numbers into odd phrases and finally telling you how to remember the order of a deck of cards. It’s all very fascinating and will leave you grinning like an idiot when you can remember long strings of random numbers

After that we move onto the third chapter, which I haven’t the foggiest what it was about because from here the book goes downhill. He starts to get self righteous and arsey. He takes a dig at religion any and every chance he gets. Now this doesn’t really bother me the first few times because im an atheist and i’d agree with him for the most part. But he starts sounding like a broken record. What follows is 150 pages of constant twittering about Richard Dawkins and why believing in anything makes you an idiot. The book becomes a chore to finish. It feels like he wrote it and it was sent straight to press rather than given a much needed 2nd draft and editing.

Don’t let it put you of too much, it’s a decent read with some interesting tidbits but the whole book is just a 100 pages too long.

C+ Mr Derren Brown, better look next time ey.