This book is filled with a good number of memory improvement tricks and techniques that are presented in a conversational style and kept to roughly a single page in length.
In addition to showing you various techniques, the author subtly weaves in ways that improve your observation skills, helps you form creative associations, and that causes you to remember.
There are little exercises through out the book, but they are just that - samples. There's nothing boring or done by rote. As you're reading along, several pages later (which could days later), the author indirectly tests you, validating that if you even try the technique, you get high return with minimal effort. Simply practicing seems to improve your memory even more.

By giving rise to new ideologies that in time transformed the political structure of much of the world, the American and French Revolutions stand as two of the most important political events in global history. The American establishment of a republican government, and the gradual expansion of democracy that ensued, altered traditional political and social thought, thus shaping the later French Revolution and creating the core ethic of later American political values. The Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution, as later spread by the armies of Napoleon, dissolved most traditional European notions of political authority. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the people, events, movements, and ideas that defined the revolutions in France and America, as well as in other parts of the world during the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions........