I can't believe people get paid to write books like this. I'm surprised it's not twice as long, since he employs half a dozen methods to inflate the page count. The actual story itself is fascinating, absolutely! But the writing was all fluffy excited repetitious drama, full of egoistic awe of one's own flair for "understanding" what these people must have felt and thought. It was a manipulative sham of a book. You know those History Channel shows where they set up this big mystery and get all d...

This book has been on my to-read list for some time, and I had a few preconceived ideas that turned out to be wrong. For instance, I had assumed that the "madman" would have been someone psychotically insane, the type of man that you would pass in the street and cross to the other side, since he would be unkempt and smelly and gibbering nonsense to unseen companions. As it turns out, the "madman" was an American doctor, educated at Yale, who was a surgeon and former Army officer. He apparently s...

...for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.” Herbert Coleridge whose brilliant life was too short.I was driving into work the other day thinking about Herbert Coleridge and realized that I might possibly be the only person on the planet driving to work thinking about

As a completely fledged bibliopsychotic and an ever-striving-to-be cunning-linguist , I was all aquiver with anticipation to bury my face in this purported history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Alas, despite being well-written and thoroughly researched, I’m having to fake it a bit to give this a full 3 stars. My primary joy-dampening problem with the book’s arrangement was the dearth of page time given to what I see as the most fascinating aspect of the story…the actual nuts and bolts

People tend to juxtapose the idea of reading the dictionary with other activities as a means of underscoring how incredibly uninteresting and undesirable those other activities are. For example: “I have to interact with Sean today…UGH. I’d much rather read the dictionary.”This is an effective comparison for good reason. Look, I love words as much as the next guy, but even I find reading the dictionary only slightly more fun than reading the phone book (“What’s a phone book?” ask all the millenni...

A man goes insane, shoots another man to death and then helps write one of the first complete dictionaries. What an odd way to enter the academic world!And believe it or not, those aren't even spoilers! Simon Winchester gives us all that right in the title of his surprisingly riveting read The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.The idea of reading a book on the creation of a dictionary only sounded mildly interesting. In the hands...

Another incredible story that one can put under the heading, "Truth is stranger than fiction." How lucky we are that now as readers, writers we can just look up a word, find its meaning and pronunciation, but such was not always the case. Until I read this book, I never really thought about this before, a time when this valuable resource was not available. What a huge undertaking this was, the amount of work staggering.Murray and Minor, two men crucial to the project, but living in very differen...

If you know me personally or almost personally, then you should be aware that I am quite mad. I have a heavy obsession with the alphabet, with inventing bizarre systems that rule just about anything in my life and catalouging things. It is quite obvious that a book about a lunatic and creating Oxford English Dictionary would be a winner with me. And it was.However, it wasn't perfect. Winchester performed some weird narrative experiments. For example, he started off with a really exciting scene,

I am unable to write a worthwhile review on this wonderful book by Simon Winchester. He has actually managed to make a book based upon the making of the Oxford English Dictionary a magical work. To think that a professor, James Murray, could work, via correspondence, with an American, Dr William Minor, a retired surgeon, for over twenty years and not realize until then that Dr Minor was in Broadmoor, a very famous and yet harsh lunatic asylum. Professor Murray, as he had never met him beforehand...

I read this under its original title. 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne'. It's a memorable book and on my list to re-read. According to Wikipedia, its title was changed to The Professor and the Madman for the US market: 'A journalist with three decades of experience, and the author of a dozen travel-inspired books, Winchester's initial proposal to write a book about an obscure lexicographer met with rejection. Only when Harper Collins editor Larry Ashmead read the proposal and championed the book did W...

This is a perfect example of a book that I wish had been written by David McCullough. I gave it three stars based primarily on potential--the story itself was very interesting; the writing was more like 2 stars. I cannot believe this man has been able to make his living as a writer on two continents. His main problem was being redundant, giving the general impression that his target audience was not-too-bright fifth graders (I don't need every little coincidence and connection pointed out 5 time...

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Cecily's marvellous review* has pointed out that Simon Winchester had a 'novelistic approach' to writing it, and I think she is absolutely right. Even so, in spite of Winchester guesstimates and meanderings (or perhaps because of them), I enjoyed it hugely. My one small quibble is that each chapter starts with an entry from the Oxford English Dictionary (at the time called The New English Dictionary.) Noooooo. Not fun. This may be one of the greatest dictionaries

Calling all bibliophiles! Have you ever wondered how that magnificent beast, the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED), came into being? Well, this is the book for you.Simon Winchester weaves together the story of two men in Victorian England: one was Professor James Murray, who was editing what was to become the definitive work on the English language; the other was William Chester Minor, who had committed murder and was living in a lunatic asylum. Both men had a love of words, and because