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

This is such an interesting book! 
Joshua Foer is a science reporter who went to the 2005 US Memory Championship in order to write about it.  He met several memory champs who assured him that anyone could do what they do and he set off to train to compete in the memory championship himself.  This book tells about his year of memory training and the interesting people who he met as part of his research including the man who inspired the movie "Rainman" and a man who could not remember anything for longer than a minute or two.  Joshua presents his research in an easy to read and interesting way.  I learned a lot from this book. I had never before heard of chicken sexing and would not have imagined that it had any connection with being a chess master, but now I know these things. You can too if you read this book.
I was also fascinated with the way that writing and reading has evolved over the years. Joshua shares some memorization techniques that he used and that can be helpful to students who need to memorize material for school.  Unfortunately, these techniques won't help us to remember daily things like where we left the car keys or why we opened the refrigerator. 
I have to return this book to the library, but I am so impressed with it that I may buy myself a copy of it to re-read and refer to and I plan to read more about memory and how it works.