The Book Club has chosen to read and discuss: The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
The Book Club has chosen to read and discuss:
The Professor and the Madman
by Simon Winchester
Thursday, 9 June 2011
6:30PM - 8:30PM ET
We are meeting in the very cozy Dupont Circle apartment of one of our
members, so you must contact the Harvard Club of Washington, D.C. for details
on location.
Please bring your own food and drink.
From Publishers Weekly
The Oxford English Dictionary used 1,827,306 quotations to help
define its 414,825 words. Tens of thousands of those used in the
first edition came from the erudite, moneyed American Civil War
veteran Dr. W.C. Minor, all from a cell at the Broadmoor Criminal
Lunatic Asylum. Vanity Fair contributor Winchester (River at the
Center of the World) has told his story in an imaginative if somewhat
superficial work of historical journalism. Sketching Minor's
childhood as a missionary's son and his travails as a young field
surgeon, Winchester speculates on what may have triggered the
prodigious paranoia that led Minor to seek respite in England in 1871
and, once there, to kill an innocent man. Pronounced insane and
confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor
happened upon a call for OED volunteers in the early 1880s. Here on
more solid ground, Winchester enthusiastically chronicles Minor's
subsequent correspondence with editor Dr. J.A.H. Murray, who, as
Winchester shows, understood that Minor's endless scavenging for the
first or best uses of words became his saving raison d'etre, and
looked out for the increasingly frail man's well-being. Winchester
fills out the story with a well-researched mini-history of the OED, a
wonderful demonstration of the lexicography of the word "art" and a
sympathetic account of Victorian attitudes toward insanity. With his
cheeky way with a tale ("It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate
man who will perform an autopeotomy" he writes of Minor's self-
mutilation), Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by
devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task.