Jonathan Margolis is a journalist and author who writes for the Financial Times, The Guardian and the Daily Mail among other publications. He specialises in technology, but also writes on China, along with a variety of quirkier, mostly scientific, subjects that interest him.
His first book was Hothouse People: Can We Create Super Human Beings? with Jane Walmsley.
His most recent books were A Brief History of Tomorrow, which analysed the successes and failures of futurologists, O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm, and Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic?
Jonathan lives in London with the author Sue Margolis and their family. See Jonathan’s technology reviews and videos at www.howtospendit.com/#/themes/technology
Uri’s ability to perform amazing feats of mental wizardry is known the world over…Uri is not a magician. He is using capabilities that we all have and can develop with exercise and practice.
Apollo 14 Astronaut and sixth man to walk on the moon
I think Uri is a magician, but I don’t particularly believe that he is using trickery. I believe there are psychic abilities. They don’t accord with any science we have at the moment, but maybe some future science will back them up with theories.
Professor of Physics, University of Cambridge, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, 1973
Uri bent a spoon for me. The first time he did, I thought there must be a trick. The second time I was stunned – completely, completely stunned and amazed. It just bent in my hand. I’ve never seen anything like it. It takes a lot to impress me. Uri Geller is for real and anyone who doesn’t recognise that is either deluding himself, or he is a very sad person.
Geller has bent my ring in the palm of my hand without ever touching it. Personally, I have no scientific explanation for the phenomenon.
I came to this book a rationalist and a skeptic. Yet, open-mindedness requires me to report that Jonathan Margolis’ carefully researched, scrupulously detailed and even-handed exploration of Uri Geller’s paranormal capacities suggests some of our current scientific understandings will need radical revision in the next century.
A brilliant book – nine out of ten.
A fascinating, unjaded, open-minded account of a great modern puzzle.
An even-handed and assiduously researched work. . . something close to a definitive assessment.
In a voice pitched somewhere between conversational, conspiratorial and professorial, Margolis takes on “the arrogance of the present each generation’s view that it is on the cusp of greatness and that the things which are important now will always be – but simultaneously argues that ours is indeed a remarkable time. The author of Uri Geller: Magician or Mystic and columnist for the Financial Times shows just how remarkably wrong or astonishingly right predictions can be. The fascinatingly odd visions covered in chapters on the mind, leisure, the human body and more will make readers wonder if current commonly accepted predictions–such as global warming are all that much less bizarre. Readers will be so effectively drawn in that they will be able to see the subtle ways that the future is already upon us (smart-lawn mowers, cell phones) and ways in which we have fallen behind our own imaginations (space travel, farming the sea). This is a clever look at how the world could have been, how it might be and how it won’t be.
Superstitious atheists will find this book toxic. Jonathan Margolis clearly spooked himself writing it and I got an attack of the creeps one night just reading it.