White Gloves: How We Create Ourselves Through Memory

Rating:
Summary: Eloquent evocation of memory and its tasks, embedded in life
Review: As the discipline of psychology struggles to emerge from its artifice-inducingdecades of behaviorism, memory research does much of the heavy lifting-- uniting laboratory rigor, theoretical sophistication, and humane concerns with "qualitative" field work (that is, talking to real people in ordinary ways). "White Gloves" presents the state of the art quite well, in a literate, well-crafted style that sounds like one very smart and wise person talking to others. The book sets current work on memory in the context of the author's life, and the lives of many famous (and less famous) characters from the professional literature.
For those who want an academic tone to their books on current science, this is the wrong book--try Daniel Schacter's "Searching for Memory." For those who find the close logic of (even the best) academic writing trying, but who would like to know the state of the art, "White Gloves" is a fine, moving choice