61 Books Like Miracle Mongers and Their Methods

I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.

I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.

I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.

I, Dan Meyer, have been swallowing swords for 25 years and researching the art even longer. I’m the president of the Sword Swallowers Association International and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine for medical research on sword swallowing. As a performer, I’m known for holding 40 world records and performing on over 100 TV shows, including 15 Got Talents, and live in 60 countries around the world. And I, Marc Hartzman, am the author of American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Strangest and Most Wondrous Performers (Tarcher/Penguin). I’ve also written nearly a hundred sideshow-related articles for AOL Weird News, HuffPost, Mental Floss, and Bizarre magazine.

I’m a devourer of Golden Age Detective Fiction, and a writer of locked-room mysteries inspired by the classics. When it comes to old-school mystery writers, my favourites are John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and of course Agatha Christie. What I love about that era is the brilliance of the puzzles, and the way those writers really engaged with the reader and (in some cases) addressed them directly, challenging them to solve the crime along with the detective. Additionally, I’m fascinated by stage illusions (though I’m terrible at performing them myself), and this has also had a major influence on my writing.

Magic hooked me at the age of eight and never let go. I began with a Mysto Magic Set, graduated to books and more books, joined magic societies, and studied with a true master, Tony Slydini, and finally began writing books about magic and magic lore (The Secrets of Alkazar, The Sorcerer’s Companion—A Guide to the Magical World of Harry Potter). What keeps my interest alive is the astonishing flow of invention that daily bubbles out of the magic community. And lucky me, I perform weekly at a fabulous little venue in the town where I live. This is a great time to learn and perform magic.

Though I’ve always found the idea of survival after death fascinating, it was my interest in Modern Spiritualism that really sparked the desire to write Chasing Ghosts. That era (mid-1800s to the early 1900s) was a time when millions confidently believed they could communicate with the dead. Of course, this was only the tip of the paranormal iceberg. So I continued the journey into the lore of haunted places, ancient cultural beliefs, and scientific endeavors to find evidence for paranormal experiences or to debunk it. As a historian of the weirder pages of the past, this topic endlessly fascinates me. I hope it will for you as well. 

My passion for developing entrepreneurial and business instinct is simple. It is all based on confidence. Over time, my experiences have shown me that many leaders (myself included) can end up in “decision paralysis” and default to taking no action at all. Leaders can have all of the information and indicators that a decision is the right thing to do, but they default to doing nothing. By developing a better understanding of my own instincts, I have been able to build confidence in the decisions I have made over the past 20 years, thus eliminating any deterrents from making sound decisions.

As a writer and lover of horror and science-fiction, I’ve always been influenced by films and media and these are just some of the texts that impacted not just my writing, but my life. Each does so much with its genre; regardless of their length, the stories are full of great characters and concepts and dabble with the perception of their genre in interesting and memorable ways. My many years of academic study were always bolstered when we were given texts such as these to dive into, and I’ve even based some of my writing style and published works on the themes, messages, and presentation of these texts.

I’m an English nonfiction writer who is, I suppose, best-known for Members Only, my biography of the London strip club owner, theatre impresario, property magnate, and porn baron Paul Raymond, which was adapted into a big-budget movie called The Look of Love. Like many of my books, Members Only strayed into true crime, a genre that has, for all sorts of reasons, been attractive to me as a writer. Probably the most important of those is that it provides the opportunity to tell inherently dramatic stories and to convey a vivid picture of the past, thanks to the wealth of documentation associated with major crimes.