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A review by pklipp
The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory by Julia Shaw
3.0
I regret that I found this book very disappointing. In its structure (chapter - interesting fact, experiment(s), implications) it seemed to be attempting to follow on the success of Predictably Irrational, but in this case, there is no effective common thread linking the chapters. One could read this book in any order, skipping any chapters at random, and miss nothing of import. There’s no flow at all. It’s a random collection of lectures by a professor of psychology loosely related to the topic of memory. I say loosely because one is simply on the fact that people mostly think they’re more attractive than average.
The author even acknowledges this in two ways. One is by calling out chapters that can be skipped if one doesn’t want to get too technical. The trouble is, that chapter isn’t the least bit technical. It was all really dumbed-down, like intro lectures for a 101 class. The other example is that she refers several times to future chapters in the past tense. It was frustrating at first until I realized that it didn’t matter that when she writes “as I explained in chapter four” in the middle of chapter one, that it doesn’t really matter because the explanation in chapter four adds nothing to the point she’s making anyway. Her editor should be ashamed.
I keep calling these chapters lectures, because of the informal nature of the writing. Annoyingly informal. It might play well to a bored class of students, but reading all the forced attempts at titillation or weak humor and the many expressions of “AMAZING!” simply felt awkward to me.
But for all my criticism, I found a few nuggets of fact lurking in the pages which interested me and which made the book worth reading. I won’t share them in this review, so as not to spoil the book for anyone, but if I wanted to I could write a paragraph half the length of this review which contained everything interesting in the book. It was a good vacation read because I had the time to waste, but if I met someone generally interested in the topic, I’d put in some effort to find a better book to recommend. Perhaps just a few of the studies cited in The Memory Illusion would suffice to cover the useful material in a much more compelling way.
In the end, though, I blame the editor for all of the faults that made it to press. The author has good material at her fingertips and she knows her subject. She just really needed more critical help in organizing it for the general public.
The author even acknowledges this in two ways. One is by calling out chapters that can be skipped if one doesn’t want to get too technical. The trouble is, that chapter isn’t the least bit technical. It was all really dumbed-down, like intro lectures for a 101 class. The other example is that she refers several times to future chapters in the past tense. It was frustrating at first until I realized that it didn’t matter that when she writes “as I explained in chapter four” in the middle of chapter one, that it doesn’t really matter because the explanation in chapter four adds nothing to the point she’s making anyway. Her editor should be ashamed.
I keep calling these chapters lectures, because of the informal nature of the writing. Annoyingly informal. It might play well to a bored class of students, but reading all the forced attempts at titillation or weak humor and the many expressions of “AMAZING!” simply felt awkward to me.
But for all my criticism, I found a few nuggets of fact lurking in the pages which interested me and which made the book worth reading. I won’t share them in this review, so as not to spoil the book for anyone, but if I wanted to I could write a paragraph half the length of this review which contained everything interesting in the book. It was a good vacation read because I had the time to waste, but if I met someone generally interested in the topic, I’d put in some effort to find a better book to recommend. Perhaps just a few of the studies cited in The Memory Illusion would suffice to cover the useful material in a much more compelling way.
In the end, though, I blame the editor for all of the faults that made it to press. The author has good material at her fingertips and she knows her subject. She just really needed more critical help in organizing it for the general public.