For the sheer vastness of one man's mind...: If you ever would want an absorbing eye-opener into the the mind of the great(est) mnemonist Shereshevsky (popularly 'S'), I recommend Prof. Luria's book. It is absorbing, and is a beautifully written work and one can but wonder about S and his mind, and how Luria brought out to the world the man and his extensive mental faculties. I am at loss of words to describe the book, for a few hundred words cannot describe the vastness of S's mind, but hats off to Luria, I enjoyed (and still do enjoy)the book from cover to cover.

I got a hold of this book after reading that Oliver Sacks found it a great inspiration which started him writing his books. However I found much of it was very dry and did not interest me in the technical detail shown. The last section, "His personality' was interesting but much too short compared to the previous chapters. ( )

Editorial Reviews

Review
New Yorker : A distinguished Soviet psychologist's study...[of a] young man who was discovered to have a literally limitless memory and eventually became a professional mnemonist. Experiments and interviews over the years showed that his memory was based on synesthesia (turning sounds into vivid visual imagery), that he could forget anything only by an act of will, that he solved problems in a peculiar crablike fashion that worked, and that he was handicapped intellectually because he could not make discriminations, and because every abstraction and idea immediately dissolved into an image for him. It is all fascinating and delightful.

Times Literary Supplement : Luria's essay is a model of lucid presentation and is an altogether convincing description of a man whose whole personality and fate was conditioned by an intellectual idiosyncrasy.

Los Angeles Times Book Review : [A] compassionate and vivid portrait.

Psychological Medicine : A welcome re-issue of an English translation of Alexander Luria's famous case-history of hypermnestic man. The study remains the classic paradigm of what Luria called 'romantic science,' a genre characterized by individual portraiture based on an assessment of operative psychological processes. The opening section analyses in some detail the subject's extraordinary capacity for recall and demonstrates the association between the persistence of iconic memory and a highly developed synaesthesia. The remainder of the book deals with the subject's construction of the world, his mental strengths and weaknesses, his control of behaviour and his personality. The result is a contribution to literature as well as to science.