Memory competitions are a strange thing to build a book around, and stranger still to build an audiobook around, since the whole discipline depends on picturing things and then walking back through the pictures. Joshua Foer went to cover the United States Memory Championship as a reporter, got interested, trained for a year under people the copy calls mental athletes, and came back with a book about what remembering used to be before we outsourced it. Penguin Audio issued the recording in March 2011 with the reading credited to Mike Chamberlain, and the interesting question is what happens to a method built on images when you can no longer look back at the page that listed them.
First, the Big Picture
Foer keeps two books running at once, which is the reason this one outlasted its news hook. One is the reporter's story of a year spent learning a skill in public, ending at the championship the assignment began with. The other is a cultural history of remembering, taking in the tricks of the mentalist's trade and the argument that a memory was once something a person built rather than something a device held. David Sheppard, writing on March 9, 2011, catches the doubleness precisely, calling it a rare thing that manages to be a joy and immensely helpful at the same time, then stopping to ask what the book actually is before answering the question at length.
Championship training turns out to be the least interesting part, and Foer seems to know it. The scenes that hold up are the ones where the skill stops being a stunt: the moment a technique that sounds absurd on paper starts working on a shopping list, the moment the trained memory begins to feel less like a superpower and more like a habit anyone could have kept. The copy's closing line, that in every way that matters we are the sum of our memories, sounds like marketing until the middle chapters make the case for it, and by then the reporting has done the work the slogan only announces. What keeps the competitive material from curdling is that Foer never treats the people he trains with as exhibits. They come across as specialists in an obsolete craft who happen to have found each other, which is a warmer and more interesting proposition than a book about prodigies.
What Makes Moonwalking with Einstein Worth Hearing
Journalism of this kind travels well in audio because the structure is chronological and the voice is one person's. Mike Morgenstein, in an August 2015 four-star, gives the plainest summary of the arc: a reporter sent to write up a room of competitors, startled by what they could do with unrelated digits and symbols, who then goes and does it himself. The same response supplies the phrase that fits the book's temperature best, an author who became inebriated with the concept of memory, and that is the register the writing keeps from the second chapter onward.
Gopnik supplies the shortest endorsement on the listing, two words in The New Yorker calling it highly entertaining, and The Boston Globe adds funny, curious, erudite and full of useful details about ancient techniques of training memory. Both are accurate about the writing. What neither can tell you is whether the technique survives the format, and my honest answer is that it half does. Following the historical chapters is effortless. Following the instructional stretches, where a system is being built image by image, asks you to hold a structure in your head without any way to check it, which is either the perfect exercise for this particular book or a small joke at the listener's expense.
A Few Reservations
Spain, France and Japan supply three of the five written responses here, which is unusual and worth knowing before you read the column as a guide. The Spanish one, filed in November 2014, calls the book enjoyable and often funny and singles out its claim that anyone can train into one of these memorization athletes. The Japanese one, from September 2023, runs two lines and thanks the store for the file, naming the e-reader platform it arrived on. At least one of the three, then, is grading a different edition outright, and the column as a whole is a poor proxy for what United States buyers thought.
Penguin Audio put this out in March 2011, and the counter beside it holds ten grades while five carry text. An average of 4.5 across ten whole-star votes forces a total of exactly forty-five out of a possible fifty, so five stars are missing from a clean sweep. One of them is accounted for by the four-star already displayed, which leaves four stars unexplained somewhere among the five silent grades. Nothing sinister follows from that. It does mean the visible column is more enthusiastic than the number above it, and a buyer scanning quotes would never guess.
The Right Listener for Moonwalking with Einstein
Technique hunters should set expectations first. The method here is presented through a story rather than drilled, and anyone who wants a numbered course with exercises will end up rebuilding it from memory, which is funny but inconvenient. The audience this suits best is the one that likes watching a competent writer become obsessed: readers of long-form magazine reporting, people who enjoy a subculture rendered without mockery, and anyone curious about why memorization stopped being a normal part of education. Students hoping to fix an exam problem this month are the group most likely to feel short-changed, since the payoff arrives as understanding rather than as a schedule.
Curiosity of a specific kind also gets rewarded here, and the response filed from France in February 2020 shows what that can look like: a buyer recovering from a concussion with partial amnesia, convinced the loss was permanent, who found the simple exercises useful enough to call the book a rescue. That is one case and not a medical claim, and nothing on the record promises a therapeutic effect. Reading it as a magazine feature that outgrew its assignment, and that happens to leave a usable trick behind, is the frame that fits.
Does the Moonwalking with Einstein audiobook work as a practical memory course?
Only loosely. Across nine hours and thirty-one minutes the copy promises a year of training under competitive memorizers, and the techniques arrive inside the reporting rather than as drills. You will finish understanding how the systems work and still need a written summary to build one of your own.
Are the press quotes on the listing about this recording?
No. The New Yorker and Boston Globe lines quoted in the description were written about the book on publication and grade the prose. They are worth having, since the writing is the thing being sold here, but they predate this edition and were never aimed at it.
Is this audiobook shelved correctly under health and wellness?
It sits under health and wellness and under science and engineering here, tagged for psychology and mental health. The science tag fits the research chapters. Anyone browsing wellness for self-improvement should know they are getting a reported story about a competition, not a program to follow.
How dated does a 2011 title about memory research feel now?
The cultural history holds up because it is about antiquity, not about the present. The passages billed as cutting-edge research are fifteen years old, and the anxiety about outsourcing memory to devices reads differently after a decade and a half of everyone doing exactly that.
