THE RIGOR OF ANGELS: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, by William EggintonChances are, if you have ever heard the story of Solomon Shereshevsky, you haven’t forgotten it. Shereshevsky’s powers of memory were so remarkable that in 1929 he gave up his job as a journalist in Moscow and joined the circus. He could recite lists of numbers, poems in foreign languages, even strings of random syllables that were called out to him from the audience. Forgetting something wasn’t a matter of passively letting it slip away into oblivion; he had to actively destroy it in his mind. As William Egginton writes in “The Rigor of Angels,” a “perfect memory” can begin to resemble “total forgetting.”

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Persons: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, William Egginton, Solomon Shereshevsky, ” Locations: Moscow