Bookmarks - The Professor and the Madman

Sorry for the late post. I came home for the reading week and have run out of premade posts.

The Professor and the Madman is copyright 1998 by Simon Winchester. Published by HarperCollins.

This is what I would call a "creative nonfiction". It is a book based heavily on the story behind the Oxford English Dictionary.

It tells you the embellished facts about the two main contributors to the dictionary, Professor James Murray who headed the campaign for the majority of its run, and Dr. W.C Minor who submitted more than 10,000 entries to the work.

Minor was incarcerated for murder, and Murray was a professor at Oxford.

It tells their stories, using historical truths and backed up data... and filling in the gaps with narrative.

I like the style of this book, it goes back and forth between narrative and laying out pure fact. It makes everything bite sized. It helps that I am interested in language and dictionaries.

All in all a good gateway book to fiction from nonfiction or vice-versa.