Customer Reviews

Professor & The Madman

5 star:		(119)
4 star:		(122)
3 star:		(61)
2 star:		(34)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

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.

This book is an 'easy' read. However, it's content is not what one might expect! I found the book quite fascinating and, at the same time learned a lot, amongst other important issues, about American history during the civil war.
The two main characters definitely left a lasting legacy! Who would have thought that, the creation of the Oxford Dictionary would involve such people of different backgrounds and, personal history.

This book stands out as one one should read!

Helga Sarkar

This book leaves me with a myriad of emotions! It is quite depressing about one man's passion and his madness. It is a wonderful study of a man obsessed words. And yet, at times I found it darkly humorous. I mean if you were working on a project that would take 70 years, you would never see finished in your lifetime, you were trying to catalogue EVERY word in the English language, the origins and variations, and do this in the 1800's when there was no computers - no typewriters....well, you would HAVE to be mad.

So if you have ever used a dictionary, you need to read this. It will give you a new appreciation of the book of words.

Talk about a tulip bulb phenomenon. Everybody loves this book because everybody loves this book. Yes, it has some interesting thoughts, but they are stretched out and repeated to fill space. Nice concept, but more appropriately a magazine or Sunday paper article rather than a whole book.

I thought this would be an interesting book. I was mistaken. It was dry. Don't waste your time.

Yes, it is an interesting aside that a "madman" helped write the Oxford Dictionary. It would have made a very nice article for a scholary magazine, but padded out it makes a very boring book. The fact of the matter is, the author really doesn't know all that much about W.C. Minor.

I like Winchester's style of writing. He is able to take some very focused, sometimes obscure, historical subjects and relate them in a way that is both entertaining and informative. This particular work is the second of two books he has written about the creation of the 'Oxford English Dictionary'. The first is The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary which is a broad look at the dictionary's history, with special focus on the most prominent editor, Professor James Murray. Professor Murray is, of course, the same professor as in the 'Professor and the Madman' wherein the (much narrower) focus of the tale is the one Dr W.C. Minor, the lunatic murderer who was such a prolific contributor to the OED project.

On the whole, I preferred this book (which actually was written earlier than the other, as I learned to my surprise). It is much lighter in tone than the later work and I found my sympathies engaged by the tragic history of the poor Doctor more so than I did the treatment of Murray (who, admittedly, is really only a subordinate 'character' to the dictionary itself). Having said that, though, I have to acknowledge that I probably would not have enjoyed reading about Minor's story quite as much had I not read 'The Meaning Everything' first. I think it would be much harder to appreciate Minor's contribution to the OED without the much more detailed account of just how the dictionary was compiled that the later book provides.

It is, just possibly, a bit of a shame that Winchester could not have written the history of the three characters (the OED, Murray and Minor) in one comprehensive volume. That may, in hindsight, have forestalled some criticisms that have been leveled at the two works individually (one book too short, the other a bit dry, etc.) but one can hardly criticize him for not having been inspired to cover the OED history before that of the poor Doctor. I enjoyed both books individually and I am glad I was able to read each as a complement to the other.

The book is well balanced between the history of the OED and the life and times of Dr. William Minor, (a major contributor).

Simon Winchester can hold back all the good stuff and disperse it throughout his writing. So just when you think you read it all, some new fact or weird quirk shows up. Interspersed with the story are relevant definitions, as they would appear in the OED. His description of Broadmoor makes you want to sign up on the waiting list.

Here is another one of those great Winchester-style historical stories that proves that improbable ideas often happen when obsessively brilliant people come together on a mission to change the world around them. In this particular work, Simon Winchester, a prominent British biographer, provides a very colorful description of what one of those unlikely ideas was - the compilation of the modern Oxford dictionary - and who the cast of illustrious movers and shakers(the Group of 40) was that made it happen. Up until the mid-1800s, work on a comprehensive English dictionary had gone nowehere. It was either too big a task for the resources at hand or not lucrative enough to attract the big publishers of the day. This story is a compilation of the adventurous, the infamous, the heroic, and the downright bizarre. For this project to happen, certain factors had to make their presence felt: the sudden expansion of the English language through the rapid growth of the British Empire and the personal passion of gifted people to see it through. On this second score, how would anyone in their right mind ever conceive of a medical doctor(Minor) doing a life sentence at Bradmoor Asylum for murder linking up with a linguistics professor(Murray) to spearhead the development of the world's most exhaustive and authoritative lexicon. Of the two, it is Dr. Minor, the certified lunatic, who comes in for the most attention because his path to fame was definitely the one `least traveled'. The reader gets to follow this polymathic character through the life-changing horrors of the American Civil War, his subsquent vagabond travels around England, before his eventual run-in with the law in the back streets of London. It is only when he was locked up in a home for the mentally insane did his true academic brilliance surface. Minor was a surgeon who had a passion for saving lives but, also, as an amateur philologist, had a passion for the study of literature and language. This book shares a lot about how the original Oxford dictionary was technically contrived and why it comes to us today as one of the ultimate authorities on the origin and use of English as a global language. An all-round fine read.

The Professor and the Madman is the yellow journalism version of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Sir James Murray, Dr. William Chester Minor, the treatment of the criminally insane during the Victorian period. I was particularly offended by the overly graphic details of Dr. Minor's self-mutilation (if you don't have a strong stomach, skip that section) and playing up of the fictionalized (and often repeated as fact) version of how Sir James and Dr. Minor first met. If the story weren't so interesting, I would encourage you to avoid the book.

Writing the first edition of the OED took 70 years and employed an unusual organizational method that has since become popular for monumental knowledge tasks -- relying on volunteers to do the bulk of the work of finding quotations that use each word in different ways over time. As someone who has always admired the OED, I enjoyed learning more about the process involved in its development. Unfortunately, that material is scattered throughout the book rather than concentrated where you can find it for a brief read through. The examples are good, however, if the material is needlessly diluted.

Thinking about that monumental effort will give you just the right foundation for appreciating how mental illness can affect parts of one's faculties while leaving others undisturbed, as the paranoid Dr. Minor employed his extensive free time in the Broadmoor Asylum for Criminally Insane and personal wealth to become of the most organized and helpful contributors to the OED.

Dr. Minor's story is the actual focus of the book. Unless you are quite interested in ironies, mental illness, and how the Victorians treated the criminally insane, you will probably find this book has more of Dr. Minor than you really care to know. It's a tragic story, but not one that I would have sought to read if the OED development process material hadn't been in the book. As background for that comment, you should know that I have a strong interest in criminal insanity and wrote my law school thesis on the subject. The book tells its story to make you feel the pain of being Dr. Minor quite well, but The Madman and the Professor won't advance your knowledge of mental illness or legal concepts of responsibility very much.

I was attracted to this book in part due to my work in leading the 400 Year Project, seeking ways to make improvements in everyone's lives at 20 times the normal rate between 2015 and 2035. I came away impressed that just a few people can make a remarkable contribution to an all-but-impossible project. I will redouble my efforts to locate such people for the 400 Year Project.

Tackle the impossible to find out what you can really do!