Moonwalking with Einstein

It's gonzo journalism with a serious geek bent. Not happy to simply report on memory competitors Joshua Foer trains for a year to become a mental athelete and win the American Memory Championship title. He still forgets where he left his keys and, shortly after the world championships, remembered he drove his car to dinner only after taking the subway home.

Still much can be forgiven for any book that contains the following sentence: “People with a great eye for chicken ass naturally gravitate to the Zen-Nippon chick Sexing School”

Joshua Foer writes a compelling account of his experiences in memory competition. The memory techniques that he describes are so simple that “anyone can do it,” but it takes a certain type of personality to commit that much effort and time to practicing those techniques. And indeed, the other competitors that he meets along the way are a little bit eccentric.

I enjoyed the variety of topics that Foer weaves into his story. It felt like reading a mashup of non-fiction genres: science, history, psychology, biography. Particularly interesting to me was the chapter on how the modern education system has shunned memorization. The common opinion is that rote memorization as a learning method is rigid and soul-sucking and that broader understanding is more important that knowing the facts themselves. Foer introduces an inner-city teacher who does teach his students to memorize facts, because in his view, understanding can't occur without knowing the facts in the first place. I always enjoy opinions that are counter to the norm, so this was a high point of the book for me.