Rating: 
Summary: Underwhelmed
Review: I had good expectations for this book, and the opening was promising, but I wish had bought and read a different book.Gold does well to hook the reader with a vivid magic scene involving the Devil, a dismembered President Harding, and a carved open live lion; all fantastical and compelling. But then the book loses stride for about 400 pages until it reaches it's equally hyper-spectacular ending. Boffo! When Carter isn't performing magic, his character is tedious and naive. Other surrounding characters are two-dimensional and introduced in overly coincidental and unrealistic ways. The only supporting character that I became attached to was Agent Griffin; he had my sympathy as a man the world was leaving behind, but in the end he was just another player thrown on stage for the big finale. Voila! ...
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Subject, Poor Execution
Review: The subject of magic in its golden era - and of the magicians who made it the top-billing art that it once was - is certainly a rich one. So it is ultimately a disappointment that a book that attempts to capture that time would fail simply due to poor execution. "Carter Beats the Devil" is a somewhat factual, and highly fictionalized, story about the life of Charles Carter. It is an interesting concept that is almost immediately derailed by lack of imagination. Tedium abounds. In fact, the book is only ever exciting or interesting when facts are being discussed. When the author must rely on his imagination, the book suffers. The story is split into numerous sections: Carter growing up, Carter as a vaudevillian, meeting Houdini, and eventual success. The only thing consistent in the novel is the lack of energy in all of the stories. Carter's growing up is a few winsome passages about the wonders of magic, interwoven with a tiresome and predictable vignette in which Carter finds his mother's vibrator. Could the author think of nothing even slightly original? Is this a WB sitcom? On the road we are continuously reminded that Carter will marry a woman named Sarah with the ridiculous device of having every fortune teller in the world give him this piece of knowledge, with no logical connection whatsoever. He meets a Sarah during his vaudeville tours, but they never talk, engage in eye contact, or anything that could be even remotely considered friendly. Yet the author makes a big deal of Sarah sending Carter a "good luck" card on a big night - we know they never even saw each other, so what should this moment conjure in us? When it is later revealed that all the performers got the card, should we be surprised? The author is the most annoying of name-droppers: local historical figures are introduced in name only, then features of their character wheeled out with no explanation. The reader is expected to make the connections. This results in several points in the story where the reader must pause, dig backwards for some explanation, and finding none attempt to plow ahead. Perhaps most irritating throughout the story is the author's obvious lack of knowledge of the art of magic. The story makes Carter is a modern TV magician, able to produce acts of magic that would be impossible were they not entirely conceieved within the mind of the author. Frustrating. Tiresome. And not very enjoyable. But it will magically make ... your money vanish.
Rating: 
Summary: Pure Magic
Review: It is hard to believe this is Mr. Golds first novel. They say the Devil is in the detail and Mr. Golds depiction of the life and times of Magician Charles Carter is no exception. Like a magicians trick , fine points of the novel weave themselves throughout, appearing and disappearing, then returning in astonishing ways. The visual pictures Gold imagines are so well told they come to life in your minds eye like you are physically there watching the magic show, so much so you can almost smell the popcorn and velvet curtains in the theatre. There is hardship and heartbreak, joy and elation, passion, mystery, fear, pain, innocence,love...a delightful read that magically transports you back to the golden age of illusion, before television, and gives you a glimpse into the backstage dreams of one of it's favorite sons.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: I thouroughly enjoyed this book from beginning to end. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys intelligent fiction, mysteries, or historical novels. Magic buffs will get extra enjoyment from the references to Houdini, and the story of how Carter is introduced to magic for the first time.
Rating:
Summary: A fabulous book!
Review: This book is great! You can tell the author truly researched his subject to write it, and the characters are all good. The plot twist ending is a great addition to it all, and just makes the book that much better. It does seem to start a little slow, but once the momentum goes, it flies! Money well spent!
Rating:
Summary: The rare book that transports joyfully to another era.
Review: A rollicking story and mystery that transports back to a lost world of entertainment and sits you front row in the theatre. I resent modern magicians but was fascinated by Carters shows on paper. This book mixes fact and fiction seamlessly and presents a wonderful blend of imaginative and historical characters. The perfect read to put a smirk on your face.
Rating:
Summary: Could it be the perfect book?
Review: Almost. Sure, there are problems. Gold has an irritating tendency to eliminate shades of gray in his characters: there are heroes and villains, and nothing in between. The book certainly isn't very funny. The early passages of the book can be uncomfortable, as if Gold did not fully come into his own until later in the writing process. That said, it's so damn good. If a better book has been written in the past five years, I don't know of it. Gold has a sparse, heartfelt manner that evokes Steinbeck's work towards the end of "The Grapes of Wrath"--than which I know no higher praise. His prose is so stammeringly gorgeous that at times one is forced to read phrases over and over before going on, simply to be able to grasp the beauty of what one has just read. His characters are both larger than life and heart-breakingly vulnerable: wracked with guilt, torn by lost love, insecure and unsure at every step. And, as with all good literature, it is the characters that make the book. An obvious parellel exists between Carter Beats the Devil and Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which concerns similar themes. I am a die-hard Chabon fan, and even I must concede that his work does not compare favorably to Gold's. In the end, Gold's is infinitely more real, more touching, and more worthwhile. Read it--it'll make your week.
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: It's hard to imagine how difficult it must be to write a historical-based novel, especially one based on something so esoteric as magic, but Glen David Gold has made it look easy. He blends an acute sense of time and place with a character that simply holds the reader's attention the entire length of the book. How else can the Marx Brothers, Harry Houdini, Warren G. Harding, and Philo Farnsworth be peripheral characters unless the protagonist is just that much more fascinating? I don't know if the real Carter the Great could have lived up to his portrayal in this novel, but it's immensely pleasurable to try and figure that out. I can't remember the last time I read a novel with so many plot twists that come out of nowhere and yet make perfect sense. Obviously in his magic research Gold learned a thing or two about misdirection. His only missteps are on two occasions where he foreshadows a bit too obviously, but that's nitpicking. Like John Irving, Gold will refer back to passages that came up several chapters ago and tie everything up in a neat package before the reader realizes it. Great book, plowed through it in less than a week, recommending it to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: A Mysterious and Magical Delight From Start To Finish!
Review: Gold's magnificent debut plunges readers into a grand adventure set against the backdrop of the golden age of magic. Come solve a murder-mystery, if you can...be thrilled by romance...and be dazzled by lovingly detailed magic performances. Brimming with the rich, and real-life characters of Carter the Great, Houdini, Pres. Harding, and more..."Carter" does more than beat the devil, it heartily entertains. A delicious read!
Rating: 
Summary: If vaudeville were this much fun, it'd still be alive
Review: Great literature this isn't, but grand, smart, sure-footed entertainment it is. Glen David Gold takes his readers on a twisting, rocketing roller coaster ride, and he is in full command of his effects, from the moment we step into the car until the moment it pulls to a gentle stop and we begin to breathe again. The blurbs and the opening pages contain some of the trappings of a murder mystery, in the matter of President Harding's untimely death and the puzzle of what role, if any, the world-famous magician Carter the Great had to play in it. In fact, I bought the book because I have a neighbor with whom I swap off murder mysteries every couple of months. It's not exactly a bait and switch, and the puzzle is eventually resolved, but it is a bit of misdirection. The Harding subplot forms the bookends, not the book. I found I didn't mind in the least. What we really get is more of a Bildungsroman than a whodunit: the story of Charles Carter's induction into the realm of stage magic, and the arc of his career. Along the way, Gold fully immerses us in two worlds just distant enough from us to be wonderfully exotic: the world of vaudeville in the final days before it was killed off by the talkies, and the world of the San Francisco upper crust as the twenties were beginning to roar. It's reminiscent of Michael Chabon's "Kavalier and Clay" in the way it makes us part of a small fraternity of hardscrabble entertainers in the golden age of a genre, and the way we get to feel the dirt of their trade under our fingernails. (As it happens, the two books have massively intersecting acknowledgment pages.) But it lacks the high seriousness of Chabon's work. It's also reminiscent, of course, of Ragtime, in its re-creation of an era and its free mixing of real with fictional characters. But I liked this better than Ragtime or its host of imitators. Too large a part of the appeal of such books is the thrill of hobnobbing with celebrities. Of the many delightfully particular characters from real history in "Carter," there are scarcely any I'd heard of before. Just the two aitches, Harding and Houdini. Okay, I did recognize Groucho Marx's incognito cameo, from a time before the brothers adopted their stage names, but most readers won't, and his scenes work just fine if they don't. Carter himself, his family, the rival madames of San Francisco's two classiest brothels, the teenaged inventor of television, the philanthropic borax king Francis Smith - they were all news to me. And none of the historicals is introduced to titillate the reader with a People Magazine fix; each is a pleasure to know in his or her own right, and each moves the storyline briskly along. When Mr. Gold graces us with his second novel, I will definitely be standing in line for it.
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