Names and Faces Made Easy: The Fun and Easy Way to Remember People

This book is essentially an extension of chapter 8 of Jerry Lucas' 1974 classic "The Memory Book". If you own "The Memory Book", you already have the Cliff Notes version of this book. "Names and Faces" goes into much greater detail than its predecessor. Lucas' writing has gotten a bit more chatty over the years and at times it seems that he is unsure of his target audience. There are a few frivolous cartoon sidebars in the book. The "meat and potatoes" of the book, though, are outstanding. Lucas does an admirable job of explaining how to associate vivid imagery with facial characteristics in order to remember names. He walks through eight case studies to familiarize his readers with exactly how he accomplishes these memory cues. Some of these cues may be familiar to those who have attended, say, sales training, but Lucas elevates this to an art form. The end of the book is a huge confidence building exercise in which readers are given 100 names and 100 faces and some gentle clues as to how to associate them together. I was quite surprised to master these associations in about two hours and was quite pleased when I picked up the book again a week later that I could recall virtually every name just looking at the faces (the faces are located in the back of the book, away from the names). This book is a very specialized niche product. I was in a situation where I was forced to learn a large number of people's names and faces in a very short period of time and this book came through for me in a major way. Highly recommended.