I'm coming to the tail end of my busy season. I rarely get to read much during this part of the year. I hope to get to this volume soon.

Here are my thoughts...

I've always been fascinated by the principle and was eager to read Mat's ideas utilizing it.

The book starts off with one of the clearest explanations of how the principle works- this was very valuable as I always knew "how" it worked, but couldn't explain "why"... now I can.

We then get into over 20 routines shared, though many of them are very similar to eachother. For example, you will learn a routine with a poker hand, then essentially the same routine with a blackjack hand. There are some exceptions, but a lot of the routines all involve the same handling, just replaxing X for Y from a presentation angle.

The packet tricks, Liquor In The Front and Poker In The Rear were actually my favorites in the book and they would fool you. Everything seems so fair and hands off. They are also easier to set up than some of the full deck effects, since as we are dealing with the Gilbreath Principle, you should already know the deck will need to be set up in a particular order.

I was personally not a fan of the non-card material in the book, but the fact that Mat was even able to extrapolate a complex card principle and apply it to very different routines with other objects deserves an applause for the creativity and his mastering of the principle.

All in all, this is a great resource for an underused and complex principle that Mat has made simple to understand and given plenty of ideas to boot. As I said, some of the routines seemed repetitive when reading through it, but if the descriptions sounded interesting, then you will find material in here that you will use.

Thank you for taking the time to write a review. I can’t, and wouldn’t, disagree with anything said there. In all honesty it’s pretty difficult to develope a new method when everything is based on Gilbreath. But I hope you’d agree there’s variation enough and slow additions to methodology from the beginning to the end.

Either way I am glad you enjoyed the book and hope you will continue to find it useful.

TuneHV: thanks as well for the review. I'm almost certainly going to pick this up at sometime (knowing myself). But still curious if anyone else has thoughts.

Just read it today. Obviously have not put any real work into practicing the routines but I did a couple of them as I read - there's some really good material in there. One of the things I enjoy about the Gilbreath principle is how using it allows one to get a glimpse of what it's like to witness good magic for the first time. It works without having to 'do the work' and feels like magic.

There's a good explanation of how the principle works at the beginning. Very useful as while I understand this principle on a basic level, I don't really understand it thoroughly. Mat's diagrams and such made it make more sense on an intellectual level for me.

Admittedly, there's a good chance I'll never perform the majority of things in this book. Why did I purchase a book I knew would be full of material I wouldn't use? Because I like the Gilbreath principle and I like seeing how it's applied. Mathew has some great ideas in this book, and reading through them gave me more of an idea of how I could apply the idea in different ways.

I enjoyed that he gave routines that weren't just card tricks, as well.

There's also a great essay at the end. A highlight of the book in my opinion and I think everyone in magic should read it.

I would recommend this to anyone interested in working with this principle.

Thank you for the review Christopher, glad you enjoyed the book.

For those that are interested, I recently put out an eBook containing three free effects from various releases of mine. It contains one of my favourite routines from BREATH and can be found on penguin magic here: http://www.penguinmagic.com/p/11187

But there's no eBook version of BREATH for sale, right?

No plans as of yet for an eBook. I am a big fan of physical books over digital, and it took me 5 years to put out an eBook of my first.

There is now here: http://www.penguinmagic.com/p/11959