Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art of the Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer 3 stars (Listopia)

[Rachel N.]

Josh Foer covers the U.S. Memory Championships for a magazine article and he becomes interested in finding out if there are ways he can improve his own memory. He gets a British trainer and begins using mnemonic tricks to help improve his memory. The book doesn't spend a lot of time on these tricks and if you want to learn how to improve your memory this isn't the book for you. The book is more a discussion on how memory works and how it connects to our ability to reason and understand. Each chapter reads more like a magazine article on a different aspect of memory. Despite everything Foer writes I don't see the value of the Memory Championships which involves events such as memorizing a deck of cards as fast as possible and memorizing a string of random numbers. Having to assign each card a specific image and then memorizing that image seems like a lot of work for a skill that won't be very useful. The title of the book is misleading in my opinion since the book has nothing to do with Einstein or moonwalking; it refers to one set of card images that the author memorizes near the end of the book.

[Jason]

This turns me off associated Einstein with memory. He is famous for say something to the effect, why remember what your can reference. Supposedly, he didn't even know his own phone number.