A captivating celebration of a life among words.
A witty memoir from a dictionary editor who insists he is not a “word lover.”
Simpson, former chief editor of the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, makes his literary debut with a delightful chronicle of his 40-year career among fellow lexicographers as the dictionary went through the long, painstaking processes of updating, revising, and digitizing its gargantuan number of entries. Unassuming, sly, and often very funny, the author paints an affectionate portrait of the rarefied culture of the OED when he joined the staff in 1976: an effort by the chief editor to incorporate the vocabulary of America’s police and CB truckers, for example, elicited “some eyebrows raised in the dictionary office (Oxford’s own code for utter disbelief, and right up there with the imperceptibly flaring nostrils).” Every afternoon, editors met for “dictionary tea-time,” a holdover from “the sedate environment” of the 19th century. Simpson’s talents—which he reveals with disarming modesty—as a word sleuth and project manager led to promotions along the way. He became chief editor during the OED’s adventuresome transition to the internet, a huge step for the staff and the dictionary’s overseer and funder, the University of Oxford Press. The author deftly characterizes the politics and personalities—including three administrators nicknamed the Admiral, the Shark, and the Colonel—who sometimes clashed, gently and decorously, during his career. In addition to chronicling the revision processes, Simpson offers lively histories for words that are quirky (inkling, juggernaut), trendy (selfie), seemingly self-evident (inferno, blueprint), and oddly problematic (same, bird-watching). Each history, Simpson says, reflects “a patterning in the language over the centuries that mirrors and comments on the emergence of peoples and nations in different eras.” The author reveals personal details, as well, especially the “sadness and helplessness” that he and his wife felt when they realized that their second daughter was afflicted with a profound developmental disability, unable to communicate with words. “Compared to this,” he writes, “the dictionary work was easy.”
A captivating celebration of a life among words.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-06069-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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