The Professor and the Madman CD (Audiobook)

from thewanderingjew

The book was recommended to me by a bookseller, one of a rare breed today who actually reads and enjoys the books on the shelves and does not merely sell them. I always value the opinion of someone who lives for books. There are two main characters in the book. One was wealthy, one poor, one Yale...

from allgenresbookworm

Simon Winchester is not a linear writer. Instead, he likes to weave back and forth from the main story to different background stories that do end up coming back to the main story...eventually. What I found fascinating was the background story of two men that were geniuses that come from opposite...

from brokenangelkisses

A tale of murder, madness and The Oxford English Dictionary: such is the full title of Simon Winchester's intriguingly titled 'The Surgeon of Crowthorne', a book all about, well, murder, madness and the OED, though there's more on the latter than the former. What's it about? Lexicographer James M...

from eleanor_eader

W.C. Minor was an American army surgeon who began to suffer from paranoid delusions and guilt-ridden fantasies, and was eventually incarcerated in Broadmoor for the random and senseless murder of a man in London. His story is both tragic and fascinating; from his suite of two cells, this educated...

from kmstock

A very interesting story about the creation of the first Oxford English Dictionary. Of particular interest (in my view) was the method in which members of the public read various books and collected quotations and sent them in, so it was an example of what we now call crowd-sourcing for a very tr...