Have you ever forgotten an important phone number, misplaced your keys, or not been able to remember the next word in your important monologue for theater class? Although you may take your (and everybody else’s) imperfect memory for granted, a few hundred years ago everybody memorized things. How did travelling bards recite the entire Odyssey? Before the invention of books, memory was people’s essential tool for survival. To this day, the lost art of memory lives on in the form of memory athletes, men and women who, through exercise after exercise, train their minds to be able to perform incredible feats of memory. Memorizing a shuffled deck of playing cards or pages of binary digits is commonplace. Joshua Foer, as a young man making his way as a reporter, was sent to report on a memory championship. Assuming that the participants were savants, he asked one of them how he memorized so well, so quickly. The man replied that anyone, even Foer himself, could do it. This book dives into the secrets of memory techniques, the centuries-old art of memorization, why we forget, the special capabilities of those who really do have natural amazing memories, and Foer’s personal endeavors in memory training.

I really enjoyed this book. It was captivating, interesting, and hilarious. Although it is not a self-help manual, you can learn some very useful and interesting tricks from this book, and I’m pretty sure you’ll love it.