This book is good but very hard core/ intense. It is mostly magic for magicians and very observant, savvy audiences. The Card tricks are not visual, but more phycological and most have to do with a memorized deck. Perfect for a magician who is very advanced or professional and is looking to fool their very advanced and professional magician friends. If that is you then this book is perfect.
I do magic for lay people, and am not extremely advanced so there were only a few effects that are "usable" to me right now. I feel like many other effects can be purchased for the same price or less and get better reactions. (The Vdeck, The poker test 2.0, or the mirage deck) Anyway this book is perfect if you want to spend hours memorizing a deck and learning uncommon moves to fool other magicians, otherwise save your money.

If you have gone to the effort to learn a memorized stack, then you have no excuse to not have this book in your library. The first half of the book deals with memorized stacks work and the second half contains several items that will definitely "wet your whistle" and pique your curiosity to find more John Born material; they are obviously from a worker's repertoire and have been well thought out and justified. Not interested in memorizing a stack? He even provides a multiphase routine using the properties of the Stay-Stack (Mirror Stack).

However, it the the first half that makes this book worth the reasonably expensive price. John Born has taken the mem-deck work to the next level. Beyond the built-in effects which ever stack you chose to learn (which, of course, you should learn from the creator/authors; Aronson, Tamariz, etc...), Born's effects only rely on the principals of and advanced methods of handling memorized decks in general and how to get maximum presentational value from all that labor you put into memorizing a stack. I also enjoyed how he took some "standard stuff" (like Bob Hummer's 3 card Mathematical Monte) and "kicked it up a notch" so even those in the know would have a hard time reverse engineering it. This is the kind of stuff I live for - good entertainment that I can still show at the club.

You slaved over some mnemonic devices and/or rote memorization to get the stack down, now shouldn't you make sure you are fully armed to take advantage of that achievement?