MOONWALKING WITH EINSTEIN The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Once we memorized things—spellings, dates, the Periodical Table, poetry, and so on. Now technology remembers for us. While attending the U.S. Memory Championships, Joshua Foer is told that anyone can improve his or her memory, so he decides to throw himself into a participatory journalistic exercise. He spends the next year being coached by “mental athletes,” wearing blacked-out goggles and headphones while learning how to memorize a grocery list or a shuffled deck of cards in less than two minutes by attaching bizarre and lewd images to each item. Narrator Mike Chamberlain’s enthusiastic and engaging tone, with its occasional gee-whiz note, is a perfect match for Foer. Chamberlain doesn’t execute accents particularly well, but his genuineness and appreciation for Foer’s quirky task more than make up for these minor flaws with an entertaining experience. A.B. © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2011]