The book takes a look at the subculture of people competing in memory in the US and worldwide. It is not a detailed book about how memory systems work or about what happens in the brain. It is in some ways a typical road-trip story where the author goes on an adventure. In this case he manages to win the US championships after practising for a year.
I liked the book but I also have many friends interested in memory work and can have a use of it myself sometimes. Only a week a go I met Mattias Ribbing who is out with a new book about memory systems where he (according to himself) tries to make them practical and not focused on competition.
The book talks about the science behind memory and also the history and how remembering texts changed from Homer's works that was retold in an oral tradition before they were written down, to today when some believe that wikiepedia makes it unnecessary to remember anything. It is an easy and in my opinion well written book that introduces the reader not only to the memory athletes subculture and to a part of mentalism (memory work) but also to the idea of how important memory was and still is. Because who would we be without our memories?
I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in philosophy of mind, psychology, rhetoric and mentalism, beside of course people that just want to know more about our memory and what it can be trained to do. The reason that it is interesting from a rhetorical point of view is that many of these memory systems were used by the ancients and described by Marcus Fabius Quintilianus and Marcus Tullius Cicero as tools for the orator.
Though not everyone agrees that it is a good book as this review from the Guardian shows, although I think it is somewhat telling that all the comments on the page defend the book.
