"The subject of this book is magic, and the purpose of it is to explain how it works."

Maybe you've already heard of the term 'synchronicity'.
It was introduced by psychologist Carl G. Jung to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related, yet lack a causal connection.
What this book tries to do, is to explain the mechanics behind such 'coincidences'.
And it also claims to learn you how you can 'engineer' such coincidences, which is the magic talked about during the whole book.

A play in three acts

The book consists of 3 parts.
The first one is the best part of the whole book. It talks about 'theoretical magic'. Even though the explanations are rather brief and simplified, this may be an interesting first encounter for some readers with more complicated theories like relativity, quantum physics, entropy and chaos theory. These all serve to explain the author's vision on a timeless multiverse and it's role in the mechanism of magic. Actually I thought about giving an extra star in my rating for this part, but then the rest of the book came and I chose another path in my multiverse.
The second part explains the techniques of 'practical magic'. Actually this felt quite amateuristic.
And this feeling totally peaks in part 3, where it's time for 'speculations'. From near death experiences over dark matter to the function of the orgasm. We learn the author's view on several subjects.

Me, myself and I

The author likes to put himself in the foreground, instead of letting facts speak for themselves.
A few names of scientists are mentioned, but not once do you get really accurate data about the studies they conducted. There are no footnotes nor is there a list of references at the end of the book. As a reader you often don't know on which exact sources of information the author bases all his assumptions.
Furthermore, the use of the word 'magic' becomes irritating after a while. Especially in combination with the second and third half of the book which become very spacey at moments.
All of this makes the book losing more and more of it's credibility and thus not suited for the more critical reader.


*Thanks to NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for providing a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

An amazing book, to which my reaction was 'wow'. The author even got me reading Colin Wilson again, which I have not done since reading 'Mysteries' and 'the Occult'. A demanding book, it makes the reader think. But a rewarding one nonetheless and the knowledge displayed is impressive.