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The Professor and the Madman
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
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- The Birth of Ingenuity
- By: Nick Bunker
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth, he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world, where he fought many battles with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of 41, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge.
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Good Book but LOTS of Names
- By Tim on 10-31-19
By: Nick Bunker
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The True History of the Elephant Man
- The Definitive Account of the Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Joseph Carey Merrick
- By: Michael Howell, Peter Ford
- Narrated by: Steve West
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Due to horrible physical deformities, he spent much of his life as a fairground freak. He was hounded, persecuted, and starving, until his fortune changed and he was rescued, housed, and fed by the distinguished surgeon, Frederick Treves. The subject of several books, a Broadway hit, and a film, Joseph Merrick has become part of popular mythology. Here, in this fully revised edition containing much fresh information, are the true and un-romanticized facts of his life.
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Amazing man!
- By Carolyn on 02-05-15
By: Michael Howell, and others
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Rush
- Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father
- By: Stephen Fried
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time he was 30, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin’s protégé, and become John Adams’s confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington’s surgeon general. And as with the greatest Revolutionary minds, Rush was only just beginning his role in 1776 in the American experiment.
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The narration problem can be corrected
- By Sandra L. on 09-27-18
By: Stephen Fried
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Eminently re-readable
- By Ellen-A on 01-02-19
By: Colm Toibin
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Mark Twain
- A Life
- By: Ron Powers
- Narrated by: Ron Powers
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
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Mark Twain founded the American voice. His works are a living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. His awestruck contemporaries saw him as the representative figure of his times, and his influence has deeply flavored the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Buy the Book
- By W.Denis on 10-22-05
By: Ron Powers
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The Greater Journey
- Americans in Paris
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
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The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.
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McCullough takes it to the next level
- By gregory m loyd on 07-12-11
By: David McCullough
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
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Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?
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JOHNATHAN SWIFT AND POWER OF THE PEN
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 09-30-14
By: Leo Damrosch
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Great subject, great writing, great voice
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Nice Travelogue
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Outposts
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Colorful anecdotes but tiring after a while.
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Audiobook Version is the Best!
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The Man Who Loved China
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No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire.
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turn your watch back 70 years
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A Crack in the Edge of the World
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San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.
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Pacific
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Best-selling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this imposing force of nature. Winchester's personal experience is vast and his storytelling second to none. And his historical understanding of the region is formidable, making Pacific a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination that is transforming our lives.
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Political Asides Have Become Bombastic Didactic
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The End of the River
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When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the Earth”, rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers.
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Stunning Informative and Scarry as Hell
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The Professor and the Madman
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The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary - and literary history. The making of the OED was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, was stunned to discover that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than 10,000.
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The Professor and the Madman
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Destiny of the Republic
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James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turmoil.
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Marvelous, Magnificent, Millard
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The Fracture Zone
- A Return to the Balkans
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Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans. Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region. Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago. When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.
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Loved this-Great combo:Story and History Explained
- By Jeremy on 07-10-14
By: Simon Winchester
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Alice Behind Wonderland
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On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation - as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature.
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Not Long Enough
- By thefrogman on 06-18-12
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The Novel of the Century
- The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables
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Putting a century of scholarship on one of the world's most enduring popular novels into accessible, narrative form, this new approach to a classic of world literature is written for a wide general audience. Packed full of information about the book's origins and later career on stage and screen, The Novel of the Century brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed to write his novel of the downtrodden despite a revolution, a coup d'etat, and political exile.
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how hard to write a book
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What listeners say about The Professor and the Madman
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Bill B
- 01-25-17
Surprised how much I enjoyed this book
I had no prior knowledge of this book or story but was very pendant surprised to find it a delightfully told tale of what would arguably be a very dull subject.
Mr Winchester manages to write this on a way anyone can enjoy. Having read it, I'm not surprised to find a film has been made. Add this one to your library.
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- Craig Schorling
- 02-02-17
A Well Balanced Book With Many Great Parts
Would you consider the audio edition of The Professor and the Madman to be better than the print version?
It certainly benefited being read by the author. You can hear the enthusiasm that he has for the subject in his reading.
Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?
It was very well put together and did a great job giving details on major events, characters, and settings. I learned a lot that I had no idea of prior.
What about Simon Winchester’s performance did you like?
As stated earlier, you can tell that he is passionate on the subject.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
mad·ness
ˈmadnəs/
noun:
madness: the state of being mentally ill, especially severely.
Any additional comments?
This was something that I picked up on a whim and the book exceeded my expectations. It went much deeper into subjects than I thought that it would. I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys learning something new about the world that we all live in.
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- Rebecca Ensminger
- 05-18-22
Cannot finish the book
So far the book is interesting, but it will no longer play. It keeps stopping at the same part (with more than 4hours to go). Not sure what the problem is or if anyone else has had this issue. I’m not sure if it’s a technical difficulty on my device’s part or the audiobook itself.
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- Etoile NEOhio
- 12-28-23
Surprised at how gory this book was
I love words and love dictionaries (which is good because my spelljng is awful). As a child my family read a lot of books and played a lot of word games and dinner table discussions always involved a trip to the dictionary. In college I discovered there was an OED and I've been hooked by the story of the making of it ever since. I have wanted to partake of this book for a long time, but never got around to it until I happened to read an historical fiction account in "The Dictionary of Lost Words". After that I had to read a part of the true story. Sadly, it didn't really live quite up to the hype. Good book, not a great book, but very informative. The narrator was wonderful and the interview at the end of the audio book was well worth the listen.
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- Jerry
- 07-07-03
Perfect example of a quality audible book.
Simon Winchester presents us with an amazing story about a piece of history that I would have never considered interesting or significant. The accomplishment of the combined efforts of the two main characters Minor & Murray added to scores of other volunteers is one if not the greatest achievement in the history of the English language.
The story is presented in a very logical yet unassuming manner, and maybe the perfect example of an audible book selection. The narrators voice is crisp, clear, and expressive.
Listen, enjoy, and recommend to a friend.
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- John
- 04-11-17
A Story of Murder and Redemption
“I think that people like…the rituals of lexicography. They find it romantic; they find the story of dictionary making something that, if they can get to it painlessly and through the story of a murderer and the American Civil War..they find it an agreeable thing to do...” Thus, Simon Winchester in his discussion with John Simpson, editor of the OED, that appears as the last cut of this recording. And he’s right; listening to this book is a very agreeable thing to do.
I admit that, at the start I had some personal preferences to overcome. Except for Manchester and Reid’s biography of Churchill (and books written by Churchill himself) I avoid history written by journalists. Just as professional historians can tend to dullness, journalists can err on the side of breeziness, a lightness of touch that fails to get at the true gist of a subject.
In his acknowledgements Winchester takes full responsibility, of course, for any missteps and the farthest thing from my mind is to be ungenerous. This book is indeed a wonderful listen. But when I hear that the American Civil War was fought over “patches of land at Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Antietam and scores of other unsung and unremembered trophies…” I cringe. The fighting wasn’t about territory per se; except for Vicksburg, the strategic value of those fields was temporary at best. Rather than “trophies” to be collected, when the smoke cleared both side moved on. The resonance of those place names is, on the other hand, more durable; they are far from being “unsung and unremembered”.
More seriously, in a book about lexicography and dictionary-making we have a right to expect verbal precision; indeed, the subject put me on higher alert for it than usual. So, when Winchester lists “muskets” among the “new weapons” that filled so many graves and hospital beds, I cringed again. The weapon that created so many casualties was a refinement on the musket—far more accurate at far greater ranges—called the rifle (or rifled) musket.
Please understand that I’m not trying to be picky or pedantic. Slips like these just make me wary of the overall quality of any book. I persisted, partly because Winchester is such a superb reader, partly because he’s such a superb writer. Mostly because his real subject—not an overview of our Civil War but the making of the greatest English dictionary—is so gripping. The brief history of the evolution of the English dictionary alone is worth the price of admission (in the 17th Century only “hard” words were included). We learn what set Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary above all previous efforts, how the Oxford English Dictionary came about in the first place, how the son of a Scottish draper ended up at the helm of this majestic project and, most amazing of all, how a certified criminal lunatic from America (by way of Ceylon) came to be one of the OED’s most important contributors. It is indeed what Winchester calls it in the discussion at the end of this recording: a story of murder and redemption.
If you love our language, revel in its literature and spend at least a few minutes every other day or so wondering, “Now, where did that word come from?” this book is for you.
There is a myriad of points I’d like to discuss with Winchester over drinks (I’d even buy). For example, he can’t imagine Shakespeare writing without a reference book that told him if he were using a word correctly, or spelling it right, or being grammatical. I always supposed that’s what set Shakespeare—and Spencer, and Sydney, and Donne—free. Having turned my own hand to the crafting of publication-worthy verse, I’ve often envied Stratford-Upon-Avon’s favorite son for the license he enjoyed, coining words as he went. While I’m all for rules and regularization, I suspect they’re what stands between us and another Elizabethan age. Agree or disagree, points like this are just another aspect of this book that makes it so engaging.
I particularly appreciated Winchester’s coda, a solemn reminder that, as painful and yet uplifting as Doctor Minor’s story is, we should not forget the tragedy that set everything in motion: the doctor’s random murder of a husband and father and the fates of his wife and children.
Finally, though I never do more than skim (if that) over an author’s acknowledgements page, this one received my full attention. Only fitting, I thought, for a book about giving due credit for the creation of a book.
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- T. Benedict
- 11-01-10
May not be for every one
Parts can be a bit dry but in all it is a great story as well as an interesting history lesson
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- Matthew
- 02-13-12
Wonderful Story, Well Told
Would you listen to The Professor and the Madman again? Why?
It's not always the best idea to have an author read his or her own work, but in this case Simon Winchester does a wonderful job of bringing his book to audio. The book itself has been reviewed so widely I feel silly adding anything, but it was great fun to see how cleverly Winchester weaves the different strands of his story together, without allowing any of the peripheral material to overwhelm the central narrative. I give it four stars only because there were several points at which Winchester indulges in speculation that doesn't illuminate or inform.
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- Dr. JSH
- 01-07-18
Very good book, just shy of great
Simon Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman" is a poignant story. The author does a superb job as narrator, although it took me a while to realize he was switching between an English and Scots accent to differentiate between narrator and character voice.
I didn't give this book five stars for all categories because the chapters about the history of dictionaries are agonizingly dull. I listened for as long as I could stand, skipped to the next chapter, heard more about dictionary history, and skipped to the next chapter where the text returned to the actual narrative arc.
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- Rahni
- 01-31-17
Taken for granted no longer
I've never before considered the dictionary with such interest before! I've completely taken it for granted. That the idea and reality of a dictionary didn't exist and actually had to be wished, worked and wanted into being is perfectly logical, but incredible to think about. The overwhelming amount of work that goes into a single entry is mind-boggling. I would be terrible at that job; when asked to define a term I know perfectly well, I often stumble about trying to succinctly and clearly teach it to another. I wasn't so much interested in the other part of the story, however, (the professor or the madman) so I think I'd have preferred to read his other book - The Meaning of Everything - that deals more exclusively with the OED itself, rather than this one.
I enjoyed Simon Winchester's reading of his own work--he's got a great voice and a good ear. Well done.
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