FOER says "fa'getta bout it!"

My memory has always been erratic. All through school, I had easy recall of facts figures and concepts. I could recall numbers and important business details with little effort and astonishing accuracy, especially when the stakes were high.  But the details of my life are sketchy.  I don't remember much about the day I got married, or when my kids were born.  I can't recall much about high school or college. I can't remember the name of the movie I saw yesterday, or the book I read last week and I lose my glasses and car keys with annoying  regularity.

So when I saw Josh Foer's book, MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN, I grabbed it, hoping to get some guidance on sharpening my memory.  What I got was a whole lot more!  The book is  clever and well written.  It is packed with a wealth of information, from the intricacies of neuroscience to the absurdities of esoteric competition, to the history of the transmission of knowledge. You'll learn about chicken sexing ( more than you'll want to know) and chess and why they are  similar.  You become intimate with amnesiacs and savants, and familiar with ancient scholars and politicians. And you will be challenged to examine where you have  drawn the line on your own performance capabilities.

Foer's own journey into the mastery of memory raises philosophical questions that he handles with honest self-reflection and sly humor.  He pokes fun at himself and our common human failings while raising serious issue regarding time, energy and values. He examines the past and looks out into the future. The book is loaded with facts and anecdotes, but reads like a novel.  He packs a whollop in just 270 pages.

I am not sure I will make the effort to improve my memory, but I certainly know more about how I could do that if I wanted to.  And more importantly, I now have more insight into why I will probably take the lazy way out.  But I do know if  I had been a journalist, I would have wanted to write a book like this one.