Daniel Mark Epstein, in The New Criterion, 850 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10019.
It has been 60 years since Hungarian magician Harry Houdini, born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, escaped from manacles inside a lead-weighted packing case-nailed shut and dropped into Manhattan's East River. But this and many of his other spectacular feats remain unexplained. And, notes Epstein, a poet, those feats were not exaggerated: Houdini's escapes were "more public than the proceedings of Congress, and...