memories, or those who are dedicated beyond normal boundaries to employing strategies by hour upon hour of practice.
At the beginning of this review I argued that this book had contributed something to three strands of interest in Applied Memory research. It has succeeded in showing, for example, the way the nature of expertise can be illuminated in general by examining the performance of memory experts, including the identi®cation of clear dierences between `naturals' and strategists. The book has succeeded in showing how real-life memory feats can be brought into the domain of the laboratory and its workings clari®ed. Finally it has demonstrated the potential real-life application of mnemonic strategies over a range of tasks, showing that high levels of practice and dedication can lead to the achievement of extraordinary performance. For the most part, of course, such extraordinary performance is by way of entertainment rather than everyday use, but increasingly the value of mnemonic strategies in important tasks such as examination performance, foreign language learning, name±face association, etc. is coming to be appreciated. This book is a valuable stimulus to the memory-improvement part of the everyday memory movement.