Winchester spends more time on the person who was Dr. His part in the creation of the OED is interesting and impressive, but it’s the human story of a ruined man graced for a time with a passion for words that raised his troubled life to a level approaching tragedy. Minor was an American, a Civil War veteran, a murderer, and, yes, a madman. Whatever the title, Winchester’s book, like his previous The Map That Changed the World, tells a fascinating story of an extraordinary individual. So in North America, we get The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Men Who Hate Women (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) are just two of many prominent examples. The original English title was The Surgeon of Crowthorne, but North American readers could not be expected to know that Crowthorne is the home of England’s infamous Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital. Besides, publishers often treat American readers as sensation-seeking simpletons. The Professor and the Madman is the second book by Simon Winchester that I’ve read, and it’s the second book by Simon Winchester that I’ve quite enjoyed. “And so he would work away, day after day-the tiny spy window in his door clicking open and shut every hour or so from the outside as the Broadmoor attendants checked on the safety and the existence of their strange patient.”
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