A Memory Goldmine

Extract

The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines a handbook as “a book containing concise information on a particular subject: a guidebook.” Handbooks come in all shapes and sizes. Often they run into volumes, but occasionally—as in this case—they take the form of a single book. We already have an Encyclopedia of Memory and Learning (Squire, 1992), a Handbook of Memory Disorders (Baddeley et al., 1995), a Handbook of Emotion and Memory (Christianson, 1992), and at least one volume on memory within the Handbook of Neuropsychology (Cermak, 2001), but this would appear to be the first dedicated handbook devoted to the cognitive science of memory. When this handbook landed on my desk it struck me as being the “mother of all handbooks,” encompassing 700 pages!