Rating: 
Summary: interesting tale --- but no mystery
Review: Good tale. However, back of book tells about 70% of the tale. Worth reading for the details of how OED was written.
Rating: 
Summary: A great tale badly told
Review: The story of James Murray's obsessive work on compiling the Oxford English Dictionary is a fascinating one. However, 'The Profesor and the Madman' by Simon Winchester sensationalizes an aspect of this undertaking that should exist as a footnote, or a chapter at best. O.K. already, so the man was in a cushy asylum and had a lot of time on his hands.
For a more in-depth account of the origins of the OED try 'Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary' by K.M. Elisabeth Murray.
Rating: 
Summary: A Well Told Story
Review: The Professor and the Madman is the tale of one of the strangest contributors to the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary, a madman locked up for murder who contributed untold numbers of entries and examples of usage to the Dictionary's compilers. Simon Winchester always writes clearly and elegantly, and he excels himself in his description of the painstaking labor over many years which produced the Dictionary. The editors had no idea for many years of the nature of one of their best contributors, and Winchester's description of their reactions, and of the meeting between the Professor (chief editor) and the madman who became friends in collaboration, is heartwarming. This is a story which should be reread whenever one's faith in human nature and redemption needs renewal.
Rating:
Summary: The energizer bunny of history making
Review: This book was an excessively long and self-indulgent piece that ruined the enjoyment of a good subject. What could have served as a decently long essay in a tony magazine became instead a confused, repetitive, and outright weird full length book.The basic facts of the story could have been boiled down to about thirty pages of interesting reading. This book instead takes us on a tedious journey that randomly returns to the topic at hand before venturing off again into philology la-la-land. By the end of the thing, the history writing became outrageously bad. Simon was trying to breathe a little life into what was a sad and anti-climactic end to a curious, straightforward little tale. The theorizing about the possibility of a sexual relationship betweeen Dr. Minor and his victim's wife was totally outrageous, unsustainable, and tacky. It was simply terrible conjecturing, passing off a possibility of extremely LOW probability. The salacious factore, however, apparently drove Winchester into the need to inflate this book. All in all, I would give it **1/2. It's not super terrible, but don't hesitate to find something better to do.
Rating:
Summary: Virtuosic Tale
Review: "The Professor and the Madman" is part history, part biography and, as the author's title suggests, part imaginative fiction. The genius of Winchester is his ability to keep the reader's focus on the object of the discourse even as he is delighting in the properties of his own discourse. Readers who might be suspicious of the "overly" clever, self-referential and self-congratulatory language of a Joyce or Nabokov, a Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco, are less likely to have any hesitation about investing their trust in this author's direct and reliable narrator. He's a storyteller of the first order, supplying all the corroborating, "factual" evidence we require to take him at his word. But make no mistake about it: this author understands and plays the language game with the very best semioticians and post-structuralists, albeit without the literary fanfare. First, he understands the "arbitrary" connection between words and meanings, as his own virtuosic lexicon demonstrates along with his impressive historical research and his insistence on making it all cohere (e.g. the cause-effect connection he practically forces on Minor's tropical birthplace and overly active hormones). But 2nd, and more importantly, Winchester's gift is to be fully aware of, and receptive to, the other property of language: "serendipity." The birthplace of Minor, for example, leads the author linguistically from "Ceylon" to "Sri Lanka" to "Serendib" to "serendipity," just as the meanings associated with Victorian words soon lead to references to Ezra Pound and John Hinckley! The central action in the London slums that leads to Minor's imprisonment in turn leads the author back opportunistically to an earlier action of Minor's on the battlefields of the American Civil War. It's Minor's branding of an Irishman that causes Minor to feel branded for the rest of his life, another of the author's many demonstrations that the naming of a thing can be as important to any writer's view of "history" as the thing named. Winchester not only writes circles around most "historians" but writes "truer" as well. He compels us into believing every word of his story while finally commanding our respect both for his literary dexterity and the inexhaustible potential of language itself. And in the end, in the last paragraph of the book's "Acknowledgements," it isn't Winchester or Murray or Minor or the OED that's singled out for the final bows: rather it's language itself or, as the author puts it, the "serendipitous moment" that only it can provide.
Rating:
Summary: Settle in with a cup of tea
Review: This is an intriguing and intellectual WHODUNIT. You can visualize it as if it were a screenplay.
Rating:
Summary: When you think you read it all something new pops up.
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A stretched out short story
Review: I agree with cabate2. But I gave it 3 stars because it was interesting. However, the story was not booklength. I value conciseness, succinctness, terseness, and pithiness. Not redundancy, as you can see.
Rating:
Summary: An intriguing and fun tale
Review: What a spectacular book. Anyone who is interested in the lexicographical arts will love this book. Anyone who likes a well crafted story will like it also. I devoured this book in two nights. I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing what an autopeotomy is, but is you are interested in what one is, read the book!
Rating:
Summary: Exceeded expectations by far!
Review: This was a really pleasant surprise! You would think that subjects like "the making of a dictionary" would denote something like a dully written book with only few highlights, but this one offered lots of them almost on every page.
Not only is the story captivating in itself, the author has a playful kind of writing style which really makes the story live. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in biographies in general. And it wouldn't hurt if you had an interest in words too.
| 
