Review: Winchester, The Professor and the Madman (1998)

[truepenny]

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

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the story of James Murray and W. C. Minor and the Oxford English Dictionary. It's well-written and engaging, although it felt a little facile at times, and the story is fascinating, both the story of the OED itself and the story of W. C. Minor, who was an American doctor who served with the Union in the Civil War and then began, possibly as a result, to go mad. He traveled to England, where his paranoia caused him to shoot and kill an innocent man. He was sent to Broadmoor, where he was made comfortable and allowed to have his books and where somehow he heard about the mammoth undertaking that was the Oxford English Dictionary and instantly desired to be a part of it. The acres of time he had on his hands (plus his already extant fascination with books of the 17th century) made him a peculiarly useful volunteer for the OED, and he was one of their top contributors for 20 years. (It took 70 for the OED to be even provisionally finished.) At the end of his life, he was allowed to return to America, but remained hospitalized as what we would now call a paranoid schizophrenic until he died in 1920.



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Comments

[lydy]

This book caused me to change my mind about the death penalty. I realized that people, all people, are more complex than we can encompass, and that no one knows what the future holds for people who are given an environment in which they can thrive, rather than shrivel and die. Minor's work on the OED, one of the wonders of the world, in no way balances out the murder he commits, nor ameliorates his racism, but it's still there. It's also real.