A book review of Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer
Stars: ***
Penguin Books (2011)
Self-Help/Memoir
307 pages
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Summary: An instant bestseller that is poised to become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer’s yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top “mental athletes.” He draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author’s own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.
Moonwalking with Einstein
This has been on my TBR list for a while so I was happy to find a copy at a local bookstore. In fact I accidentally bought it twice! Leave it to me to buy a book about memory twice because I forgot I bought it. I finally got around to it. I’m glad I read it although it’s not quite what I thought it would be. I thought it would be more of a how to be better at memory. It was a little like that but it was also just more of a memoir of the author’s journey towards learning about memory.
You will read about the people who have the best memory and the worst memory in the world. The author learns memory tricks and trains for memory tournaments. Did you know they had these? I didn’t!
The best part is when he teaches us about the memory palace and walks us step by step into memorizing a strange to-do list. Apparently it’s a lot easier to remember things if you make a visual representation in your mind. But it should be bigger or weirder than normal. Instead of remembering cottage cheese by remembering what a container of cottage cheese looks like, we are told to imagine a kiddy pool filled with cottage cheese and a naked woman swimming in it. You gotta admit, that’s hard to forget.
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