Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art And Science Of Remembering Everything (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
I loved this book. It helped me understand the way memory works. I've always thought my memory is not sharp enough for all the plans I have for my life.This book showed me the way to excersise it, and to better retain the information on my head. As the books says, the way we perceive the world, is the combination of all our past experiences and what we remember of them. So, from now on, I'll try to rember more. :) This book is a bit of journalism, a bit of popular science and history, with some personal meditations on personhood mixed in with the author's story of competing in the US Memory Champion. So we've got some Karate Kid, some disturbing imagery of celebrities engaging in unlikely (and purely imaginary) acts, some comparisons of the mindset of the ancient and modern worlds, and a very interesting history of reading. That last came as a surprise though the author makes a very good case that the first books were not meant to be read as we read today; written material was there to be memorized, not read, and that makes the ancient reader a very different kind.Foer is just the right author for this material. It is light and some of it feels like filler, but it is interesting filler. He does not promise to make the reader into a memory athlete - there are tons of books and websites to teach that - but instead to engage us all on what we are, if not our memories.I listened to the Penguin Audio edition narrated by Mike Chamberlain. He does a good job overall but he misplaced a few words - causality became casualty, that kind of thing. It's a good listen.
What do You think about Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art And Science Of Remembering Everything (2011)?
I found some of the books memorization techniques very helpful.
—TracyB
