This relatively short book is about an exceptional man with an extraordinary memory capacity. The author introduced him as "a Jewish boy who, having failed as a musician and as a journalist, had become a mnemonist". Whilst the focus of the book is the subject’s "vast memory", what the author eventually depicts is a man whose total personality is truly unique and complex. What emerges is a picture of a strange man with very great expectations but unfulfilled ambitions, whose inexhaustible memory capacity is matched only by his enigmatic nature. Quite fascinating is the author’s forensic and painstaking unraveling of the underlying mechanism behind this man’s phenomenal memory and unusual character (page 4). The book’s comprehensive approach was guided by the author’s precept that ‘the thoughtful physician is never interested merely in the course of a disease he happens to be studying at the moment, but tries to determine what effect a disturbance has on other organic processes…thus giving rise to the total picture of disease (pages 4-5). He exemplified this precept throughout the book, urging others to follow his example and study other psychological syndromes such as this (page 5).
The author, a psychologist and neurologist, studied the protagonist, now known as Solomon Shereshevsky, for almost thirty years, starting in the 1920’s. His approach was methodical, typified by a keen attention to detail, and carried out over a long period of time. What he unearthed was a rare and exceptional man whose memory he described as ‘one of the keenest the literature on the subject has ever described’ (page 3). It didn’t take much testing for the author to realise that "it was impossible to establish a point of limit to the capacity or the duration of his memory" because he had the