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Excerpt from the book:
 Preface
The manuscript for this book came into my possession totally
unexpectedly. A professor of psychiatry at my university introduced
me to a man he was treating for amnesia. The man was ordinary
looking, about thirty years old, well dressed and in possession
of a large sum of cash. My colleague explained that the man
could not remember where he had come from but thought his
name was Aleshker. Since my wife and I had a large house and
our children had already left home, the psychiatrist suggested
that we let Aleshker live with us, as a paying guest, while
he recuperated. We agreed.
Aleshker turned out to be a pleasant person, polite, intelligent,
and extremely inquisitive. He asked questions about every
aspect of American life, and he seemed to remember, in photographic
and phonographic detail, everything that he saw, heard, or
read while he lived with us. Since he never recalled what
his first name was, we called him Al.
We took him everywhere we went: parties, the theater, opera,
sports events. Everywhere he was observant and everywhere
politely curious. And he read, quickly and intently, everything
from Plato to Superman comics.
Soon after he moved in he asked permission to use my word
processor, to record the progress of his recovery. Every day
he spent several hours at the machine, especially toward the
end of his stay with us. Six months after he arrived Al told
us that he finally remembered; he had come from New York,
he said, and he was ready to return there. He bade us a friendly
good-bye, took with him the disks he had recorded, and departed.
When I next used the word-processor I realized that, without
Al's knowledge, a hard-disk copy of all his recordings was
still in the machine. I tried to trace him in New York, unsuccessfully.
He seems to have disappeared.
Aleshker is apparently under the delusion that he is an
extraterrestrial being. But his manuscript, written from a
quite different perspective than that of American sociologists,
may be of interest to what Aleshker calls "earthlings."
Leonard Feinberg
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