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Title: Professor and The Madman, The by Simon Winchester, Jones Simon ISBN: 0-694-52066-7 Publisher: HarperAudio Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 Format: Audio Cassette Volumes: 2 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.81 (344 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Wonderful story, questionable authorship
Comment: "Professor and the Madman" is a truly fascinating story and gives an intriguing overview of how and why the OED was made. That said, I feel the book was a disappointment. It does not seem that Winchester took the needed time to research his topic. So many questions are left unaddressed, yet the author then devotes pages of irresponsible and, I feel, ignorant conjecture on the source of Minor's madness. His theories flow back and forth from Minor being a strange eccentric to a schizophrenic to suffering from life-long post traumatic stress disorder. It reads more like the author's notes rather than finished copy. I was also left wondering so much more about Dr. Murray. We need to know more about his family, his incredible compassion and dedication to a project, his struggles. The title, although wonderful, misled me into believing I would be reading about two men with intriguingly parallel yet opposite lives. What I got was a story about a well-read madman and scant about a professor. The author mentions several times the famous sheets of paper Minor used to write his definitions. Why can't we see them? Famous photographs were mentioned, yet never shown? What about a picture of the asylum or the library? Any solid non-fiction account would have these. Winchester further lost me when he concluded the book with the already obvious point that without Minor's madness there would be no story. Well, of course. I think this story deserved better treatment or at least more research and time by the author.
Rating: 4
Summary: interesting story
Comment: This is a marvelous book about the Professor, James Murray, the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Madman, Dr. William C. Minor, one of the Dictionary's most prolific contributors, despite his incarceration in an asylum for the criminally insane after committing a senseless murder provoked by his delusions. The book tells the stories of each of these protagonists as well as the making of the OED itself, and nicely wraps up all of the connections, even to the point of showing what happened to the murdered man's family (whose widow visited Minor regularly
for months).
Rating: 3
Summary: Quick read for philologists, historians, and others.
Comment: I like reading the occasional historical fact (rather than historical fiction) "novelette," and The Professor and the Madman was definitely easy to get through. One can learn much from books like this, particularly the way normal people lived their day-to-day lives in a certain time and place.
A few things I liked about this book:
1. One will assuredly learn a thing or two about the English language, in reading it. You will learn some obsolete words, the origin of some words, and just get a refresher of other, more common words. Each chapter begins with a dictionary entry of a particular word, some very normal words, some more exotic words.
2. The parallel lives of the two main characters are interesting to follow. One feels real emotions for both. There are a few shocking moments in the book, which stand out quite a bit in front of the otherwise fairly tame narrative.
3. I grew up with the Oxford English Dictionary, and I always wondered how they compiled all the words. It was great learning about how they did that.
4. The book covers an array of themes and topics, and a fairly diverse geography. Mental illness, civil war, sexual propriety, crime and punishment, one can learn a little bit about a lot of issues in the reading of Simon Winchester's book.
I wouldn't recommend the book to just anyone, though. It can be kind of slow, and sometimes one simply grows tired of bouncing back and forth between the two main characters. It is also fairly short; one sort of wishes for more detail on certain events. In some places, the book reads like a crime/detective novel from the 19th century, in others it is more like a biography. It sort of skips around from one style to the next, almost as if different parts were written at very different times by an author in very different states of mind. Overall, though, this book is a nice, quick read, a good plot, and you will learn a thing or two from it.
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Title: The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0198607024 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Map That Changed the World : William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0060931809 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0066212855 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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Title: Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel ISBN: 0140258795 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The River at the Center of the World : A Journey Up the Yangtze and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester ISBN: 0805055088 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: 15 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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