Review: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I LOVED this book! It's one of those books that I stole time for. What? Someone needs to go to the store? On it! Just let me grab my audiobook...

I kept being reminded of Dava Sobel's book "Longitude". The books are both history based and have a good bit of storytelling, good storytelling! It was very interesting to have, at the end, the author tell of the current state of the gravestones of both the madman and his victim. It was also very neat to hear (in this audiobook edition) an interview between the author/narrator Simon Winchester and the current editor of the OED!

It's hard to talk about this book without giving away spoilers in the fashion of interesting tidbits, because it is just so interesting. So, I'll leave you with that.

If you like this book, try Dava Sobel's Longitude, and vice versa.

(Book summary from Goodreads.com)

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.



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