He is the author of several books, including works of travel writing, history and acclaimed biography, including The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998). Overall, it's an interesting story, told with too many diversions.Simon Winchester is a writer and regular contributor to magazines and newspapers including Condé Nast Traveler and National Geographic. The last three chapters are really not related to the main narrative at all - they are acknowledgements and an interview. As to the performance itself, Winchester's voice is pleasant and he reads the text very well, but there are odd bursts of classical music throughout - not just between chapters (which are not announced) but randomly within chapters. I'm not begrudging the author diverging into histories of the development of different English dictionaries or different words and their usages, but some of them were extensive beyond their actual relation to the main focus on the OED that it became distracting and boring. One example is early in the text when the author goes on a tangent about the different definitions of the word protagonist, the development and history of its usage etc. However, I feel that this book pads around the story with so much fluff that we end of losing this main narrative amongst all the author's side trails and supposings. The underlying stories of WC Minor and James Murray are extremely interesting, in their parallels and divergences, and the story of how an inmate at a Victorian insane asylum came to be one of the most effective contributors to the OED is extremely interesting and could easily take up 18 chapters by itself. I wanted to like this book so much more than I did I will need to purchase this book in a tangible tomb to enjoy it all over again. This is a facinating tale, one which causes a renewed appreciation for the great Oxford English Dictionary, read by the author with the exact pitch, pace and power required.
This story focuses primarily on three men who devoted their lives to this exercise in endurance, one involuntarily and indirectly being Mr George Merritt (English) one with captured time Mr William Merritt (American) and a methodical and meticulous Scotsman, Mr James Murray (later knighted). What is English? What meanings do words have? Is grammar important? How are dictionaries made and more importantly how was the greatest English dictionary ever compiled, made? This is NOT a work of fiction, it is the true, well researched story of how the Oxford English Dictionary was meticulously, researched, compiled and willed into existence by many many English and American studious and diligent readers, compilers, editors, typesetters and a University that continued to believe in the absolute necessity to document the English language.
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