Book of the week: Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

(Penguin, $27)

Joshua Foer really knows how to flatter a reader’s intelligence, said Marie Arana in The Washington Post. In his “deeply engrossing” debut, the young science journalist and 2006 U.S. memory champion speaks eloquently for a withering human talent. Using himself as Exhibit A, he shows that even the absentminded have the capacity to perform amazing feats of memory—such as retaining in just two minutes the full sequence of a deck of cards or storing up to 50,000 digits of pi. Those may seem useless tricks in an era when most of us outsource the work of remembering to our smartphones and laptops. But Foer’s “resounding tribute to the muscularity of the mind” isn’t merely motivational. It suggests that if we allow our memory skills to atrophy, we will lose an essential part of ourselves.

What part that would be, though, we never learn, said Alex Spanko in The Boston Globe. While Foer speaks of memory as being critical to our ability “to find humor in the world” and “to create new ideas,” that doesn’t explain the usefulness of the “freakishly strong memory” that he ends up cultivating. The contestants he meets at the first U.S. memory championship he attends aren’t inordinately wise or clever: “They come across as the same kind of harmless obsessives who vie for chess and crossword-puzzle championships.” Even so, Foer dedicates himself to joining their ranks, spending much of the next year camped out in his parents’ basement, blocking out distractions as he pores over printouts of 1,000-digit numbers.

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“Let it never be claimed that there is no cost to self-improvement,” said Alexandra Horowitz in The New York Times. Using techniques that date to the ancient Greeks, Foer learns to convert data sequences into various series of “disgusting, bizarre, and novel images” that most of us “would try hard to forget.” A moonwalking Albert Einstein is one of his cuter creations, but Foer is also now stuck with visions of a friend urinating in Pope Benedict’s cap and of the actress Rhea Perlman engaged in “indelicate acts” with basketball star Manute Bol. Still, there’s no reason to be disappointed that Foer’s intense memory training failed to make him the world’s smartest person. Not only has he provided a fascinating history of memory’s role in Western culture and a suspenseful account of a quirky competition, he’s also given us the image of a hula-hooping Dom DeLuise.