Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past by Douwe Draaisma
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
“You’ll come away with hopefully more questions that you had at the beginning”. It says something along these lines on the back cover on “Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past”. I didn’t come away with more questions. In fact, I didn’t even get an answer for the title of the book! It’s structure and content is such that it doesn’t analyse the problems at hand in depth or in a way that led to some visible conclusion (I’m one of the people that accepts the conclusion of no conclusion quite alright. Imagine.) Instead, it’s little more than a collection of case studies. Interesting case studies, I have to give Mr. Draaisma that, but ones that do not come very close to trying to tackle the huge chapter of human life that is autobiographical memory. This book could be so much more. Instead, it’s just a text of well-organised and researched memory-related anecdotes that might be interesting by themselves but come across as superficial. A pity; memory, together with time, is one of my favourite topics.