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Rating: 
Summary: Interesting collection of cases to make a point.
Review: I found this book a very interesting reading, and surely learned some new facts. This book stimulated my eager to reflect upon what a delicate and intricated concept memory is. I particularly dislike all the "art" references the author makes in every chapter of the book. I really think this was an unnecessary complement that in my opinion not always makes a good pedagogic analogy. The book format was a little bit square, but I suppose that helps to order ideas in one's brain. Anyway, the book is really interesting and the cases are very well selected, though I personally don't like to rely that much on induction, but also I know that sometimes this is inevitable.
Rating: 
Summary: A college student from Southern California
Review: I read this book and recommended it to a professor who teaches a Learning and Memory course at USC. He now uses it as required reading. A very good book.
Rating:
Summary: great read
Review: Schacter has written a superb overview of the working so the brain and memory. I read this book in one night! I can highly recommend it!
Other recent great reads: "Decoding Darkness" (Tanzi and Parsons) on how Alzheimer's affects the brain -- fascinating stuff!
Rating:
Summary: great read
Review: Schacter has written a superb overview of the working so the brain and memory. I read this book in one night! I can highly recommend it!
Other recent great reads: "Decoding Darkness" (Tanzi and Parsons) on how Alzheimer's affects the brain -- fascinating stuff!
Rating:
Summary: Explains how memory works and how it fails
Review: The title of this book is not very helpful in understanding what this book is about. There is a translation of Schacter's book (ISBN 3498063243) in German titled "Wir sind Erinnerung", meaning "we are recollections". These three words sum up the essence of the whole book much better than the original title. Really.Schacter seems to be one of the leading scientists in the field of research on memory. He coined several technical terms of the field and built theories about how humans remember, what they remember and how they fail to remember. This book is a summary of Schacter's work over the period 1980 to 1995 in plain words. While the main text uses very few technical terms, there are many many references to scientific papers. The Notes section stretches over 40 pages, the bibliography covers 35 pages, and the index is excellent. All in all a well written book about a scientific subject. If you are a scientist in the field, this book is not for you. You should read scientific papers instead of reading 400 pages of a paperback book. There are some other things I do not like about this book (which others seem to like). Schacter often refers to paintings of artists which are reproduced (in black and white, no colour) in the book. These pictures illustrate the way some artists feel about several aspects of memorizing. Well, I am not interested in such poor black and white reproductions, but perhaps you like it. Another annoying feature of this book is that there is often too much story telling in it. I would have liked more conciseness and precision instead of the many many cases a clinician sees through his career. Anyway, it was good enough to keep me reading it from the first to the last page.
Rating:
Summary: Cognitive psychology of memory
Review: this is the best review of the cognitive psychology of memory, by one of the leading experts in the field. I personally did not enjoy the artistic aspest of the book, but many say it was complementing. Now there are much better cognitive neuroscience books on memory -Kandel and Squires books, Steven Roses, among others- but as for the psychological aspects, this book stands above all others. At times it reads too much like a collection of case studies, but few would deny that lesion studies have contribuited a lot to an understanding of the brain/mind.
Most of the memory field is covered: recogntion vs. recall, implicit vs. explicit, episodic vs. procedural, short -long term, working memory, genral,emotional, semantic, etc..... but there is also a welcome and thorough discussion of false and recovered memories. In no other field can one see better the imediateimpact that cognitive psychology of memory has on legal and social issues. Schacter effectively explains everything we know about the phenomenon. As for the other themes, adequate and sufficient reviews are given. I personally would have liked a bit more of neuroscience, but it is a great read nontheless. There is also not much mention of the relationship between memory and other higher cognitive processes, like consciousness (a good place for speculation) or attention. But Schacter sticks to what is known, and does it well.
AS an introduction to any aspect of memory studies, few texts are better than this one. But I would tell anyone interested to also read other Schacter books, as well as more pure psychology and neurological texts on the subject. (see Seven Sins of Memory by the same author, Kandel and Squires Memory:from Minds to Molecules and Roses The Making of Memory among others).
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