Using his youthful notebook entries as a roadmap, DelGaudio embarks on a journey through his own past, stopping at the significant signposts that led him into the heart of a world populated by swindlers, con artists, and card cheats.
In Amoralman, Derek DelGaudio’s masterly memoiristic account of lying and self-deception, we start life fully capable of truth-telling ... Amoralman can be seen as a series of illustrations about how we deceive ourselves into believing that whatever we’re doing is right and good. There’s the sense that the only thing we can be certain of is that we’re being deceived. But also, that the real Amoralman, the most amoral man of all, is ourselves.
Secrets are at the center of Derek DelGaudio’s memoir A Moral Man. There are the secrets he chooses to keep and the ones he decides to reveal. In DelGaudio’s telling, family secrets lead to larger secrets and ultimately to his decision to cheat at cards. It is an interesting premise, and once DelGaudio gets into his journey with sleight of hand tricks it works. What is harder to follow is the family back story DelGaudio offers early on. Real life is less real than what happens when magic enters the narrative, it is the magic that makes DelGaudio’s words magical.
A rarity, a work of thoughtful, honest self-awareness that isn’t quite like anything I’d ever read before. And believe me – that’s a good thing. It’s a story of truth that is unafraid of untruth, which might sound contradictory, but when you delve into DelGaudio’s words, it makes perfect sense ... This book is magic in multiple senses of the word. It is magic because it is narratively transportive, a book that sweeps the reader up into the world being created, pages crammed with vivid storytelling. But it is also magic in the performative sense, in that it is also about the art of stage magic, specifically sleight-of-hand. And it is magic in that it allows its author to reinvestigate his own history, to use the perspective of the present to change his view of the past – a transformation of both the man he is and the man he once was ... a memoir unlike any other, beautifully written and brilliantly conceived. Derek DelGaudio is an artist whose work defies categorization.
