Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, 307 pages, nonfiction, memory.
Foer, a freelance writer, discovers that it is easier to definitively decide on who is the world's strongest man than it is to decide on who is the smartest. In trying to figure it out for himself, Foer comes across accounts of Ben Pridmore, a man who can memorize 1,528 random digits in one hour. This leads the author to the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship, conversations with Pridmore, Ed Cooke, Tony Buzan, and other Mental Athletes and big names in the world of Memory. It also leads him to several articles on the topic, and then at the suggestion of one of them (I believe it was Cooke) the author decides to train, for several hours every day, in order to compete in next year's championship. We then follow the author through that next year. Along the way we learn many things. We learn that European Mental Athletes look down upon their American counterparts. We hear a lot about Simonides of Ceos and his memory palace, and while we get the basic idea how to construct our own memory palace, I am still a bit befuddled about the whole thing. The book is reminiscent of Christopher McDougall's Born to Run (participatory journalism and extreme running) and James McManus's Positively Fifth Street (participatory journalism and no-limit Texas Hold-em), though Foer seems less sure than either of those authors as to whether or not his quest is really worth doing. Foer's doubts about the utility of improving ones memory and doubts about himself in doing this made Moonwalking an uneven read for me. I did enjoy his slowly evolving story of how he seems to believe (though he does not state it as such) that Daniel Tammet, author of Born on a Blue Day, is a bit of a fraud.

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