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The Professor and the Madman
Simon Winchester
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"This book has been around for a while, and I'm not sure how I first discovered it. It was on -- it was one that I'd seen reviewed some time ago, it was on my reading list, and I finally got ahold of it and decided to take it on vacation with me.
The book is about how the Oxford English Dictionary first came to pass, and reading about that was pretty interesting in and of itself because I had no clue about the OED. And so many people, so many writers, and so many individuals love this book; and I really didn't even understand the different components about it. The other half of the book focuses on the two interesting two characters, two interesting individuals -- real life characters -- who were major forces in creating this book, and that was Dr. Murray and -- or rather Professor Murray -- and Dr. Minor, an American who was committed as a lunatic for a murder and who helped to shape the OED.
I liked learning about the creating of the Oxford English Dictionary, I liked reading about Minor, who was the murderer who was in an asylum for many, many years; and also, it was interesting to hear the story of James Murray and how they -- what their lives were like and how they came to be involved in the OED.
The one thing I became frustrated with in the book is the book is called The Professor and the Madman, and it seemed to take forever for the professor and the madman to ever meet. I took this book on vacation; I don't recommend this book as a beach book; while I'm not crazy about books that are classified as beach books is they tend to be a little two lightweight sometimes. This is a hard book to pick up, read a few paragraphs and get into, unlike a novel where you could follow the story more easily. So it's not so much I didn't like the book; it's just I really wouldn't recommend it for light beach reading where you're gonna pick up the book for five minutes.
I would recommend the book to anybody who's interested in linguistics, anybody who's interested in the basics of the OED or never knew anything about it. I think it's a really interesting story just how this book, in its many, many volumes over many, many years, I think it's a really interesting story how it came to be created. I had a hard time reading this book because it was a little hard to get through in the circumstances when I was reading it; but I think it's a well-written, very interesting and well-researched book, so I'm going to give it four stars."
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