If you know me personally or almost personally, then you should be aware that I am quite mad. I have a heavy obsession with the alphabet, inventing bizarre systems that rule just about anything in my life and catalouging things. It is quite obvious that a book about a lunatic and creating Oxford Eng...
Simon Winchester gave us a lot of information in this unusual tale of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. So why do I feel it was stretched out even at 200+ pages. Well, it really is a bit of a thin story . Aside from the story of Dr. Minor's crime and his resulting mental incarceration, no...
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 edu...
This is one of those weird books where the subject matter is extremely interesting, but the writing only so-so. I'm glad I stuck it out though, because the descriptions of what it takes to complete a reference book as complicated as th Oxford English Dictionary was absolutely fascinating! It must ha...
In college, I was obsessed with owning the full multi-volume OED. But with my income, the closest I could get was the 2-volume set in a box witha drawer containing the necessary magnifying glass for the microscopic print required to reduce the dictionary to such a size. When I saw this book about th...
One of those true stories that is so unlikely that if it were a novel it would be unrealistic. How a violently insane man became one of the major contributors to the most famous dictionary of the English language.
Enjoyable read on the making of my favorite dictionary, the OED. Although the main focus is on the lives and interaction of Minor and Murray, also provides some highlights on the other major contributors. Chapters begin with word entry from OED, word gives small preview of what to expect.
I had such high hopes for this book. What a subject, right? Making of the OED AND an insane murderer: how can it go wrong?I don't know how, but it did. This treatment of such a fascinating story is pretty much lackluster: the author spends a lot of time focusing on the madman, understandably, but th...
The pretext for this book is rather slight – one of the significant volunteer contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary was, although an intelligent and educated man, also an inmate of an insane asylum, confined for a murder committed while in the throes of a schizophrenic paranoid delusion.Whil...
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