A magnificent account, swift and compelling, of obsession, scholarship, and, ultimately, philanthropy of the first...
The conception, gestation, and birth of the world’s most comprehensive and authoritative dictionary.
Winchester (Krakatoa, p. 220, etc.) returns to territory he first excavated in The Professor and the Madman (1998), which told the stories of OED editor James Murray and his brilliant assistant, William Chester Minor, incarcerated for murder and madness. Here, the author deals only briefly with Minor near the end and focuses instead on the brilliant, dedicated, even obsessed men and women who created the dictionary despite war and illness, insanity and insolvency, and the sometimes vicious politics of publishing and scholarship. Winchester begins in 1928 as the final pages were published of a work that began with the volume A to Ant in 1884. Many notable contributors never lived to see the completed dictionary, but many others attended the grand celebratory dinner, among them J.R.R. Tolkien, who in 1919 had worked on the project and was remembered for his struggles with the difficult word “walrus.” (Later, he would help the OED define “hobbit.”) Winchester pauses for a few chapters to remind us of the story of the English language—remember those pesky Angles, Saxons and Jutes?—and to sketch the history of dictionaries. By the third chapter, we meet the tale’s giant: James Murray, who signed on as editor in 1879 and died in 1915 while working on T. Winchester also profiles gadflies Benjamin Jowett, and Philip Lyttelton Gell, who harried the deliberate and meticulous Murray. Most interesting, of course, are the flotsam and jetsam that the author displays. “Zyxt” is the final word in the dictionary; “black” took three months of nonstop work; the first installment sold for 12 shillings and 6 pence; editor Henry Bradley could read a book upside down; the next published edition may run to 40 volumes.
A magnificent account, swift and compelling, of obsession, scholarship, and, ultimately, philanthropy of the first magnitude. (30 b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-860702-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
Though not in a league with those of Coleridge or Joyce, Greene's dreams compose an alternate autobiography of his private self in matter-of-factly unreal vignettes. Culled from the thick journals of his dreams that Greene (The Last Word, 1991, etc.) obsessively kept in his vigorous old age, and posthumously published in accordance with his expressed wish, this slim volume catalogs his adventures and escapades in what he called "My Own World," as opposed the shared reality of "The Common World." In these dreams, his encounters with the famous — Khrushchev, Edward Heath, Queen Elizabeth — often seem dull and ordinary; his travels possess only recycled verisimilitude compared to the Haiti, Vietnam, and Cuba we see in his novels; and his literary reveries betray an innocent craving for approval from the likes of Cocteau, D.H. Lawrence, and Sartre. The most curious and intriguing dreams magnify Greene's fantastic side and combine it with an uncharacteristically carefree humor. Those in which he is a criminal or a spy (in one, assigned to assassinate Goebbels with poisoned second-hand cigarette smoke) seem to parody his own semi-parodic thrillers. Some of the more surreal literary vignettes — a trip on a South American riverboat with Henry James; a guerrilla campaign with Evelyn Waugh against W.H. Auden — are hilarious pulp belles lettres. Larger issues of religion and imagination, however, are less amplified here than in his waking corpus and are typically reduced to altercations with sloppy priests or comments about the neurotic drudgery of producing books. The few brief examples of dream-inspiration and theophany are unsatisfactorily developed and give no real clue to his creative process or religious life. A uniquely candid self-portrait, but Greene's inner world only adumbrates his real-world exploits and the world he consciously created in his fiction.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-670-85279-1
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Actor, director, producer Grodin (How I Get Through Life, 1992) makes an appearance as a purveyor of theatrical anecdotes. Noel Coward he's not. Written between takes during the production of his recent film Heart and Souls, this disjointed effort to depict Grodin's career as Mister Showbiz is not uniformly dull, to be sure, but the proud exhibitions of putative wit are wan indeed. After a Nixonesque assertion that, unlike the characters he has played, he is ``not a jerk,'' Grodin recounts all the clever things he's done and said. Obviously, he is no jerk, but with banalities on the order of ``sometimes life feels so short and strange,'' he's not the deepest thinker, either. This backstager sometimes reads like a parody of personal hype. ``Forgive me for this self-aggrandizement,'' he apologizes parenthetically, ``I'm trying to make a point about stupidity.'' It's not all self-centered. For example, there are comments about others—like those who didn't dig his oblique wit or couldn't handle his success. Names drop like hailstones. ``Danny Thomas was a friend of mine whom I knew through his daughter, my friend Marlo.'' Otto Preminger and Diane Sawyer, Art Carney and Oliver Stone, Gilda, Johnny, and Dustin all serve as second bananas to our Chuck. Conversations are recalled, oddly, as scripted dialogue in this stream of self-consciousness. The text begins with spirit as Grodin denies close relationship with most of the ``100 Most Powerful People in Hollywood'' and gains strength again near the end with a diary of the making of Heart and Souls, which has since turned out to be a very modest box-office draw. But, on the whole, the occasional author and full-time light comedian upstages all, including himself. If not quite a bomb, Grodin's latest presentation isn't a hit, either. It's just a dud. (First serial to Premiere; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-545795-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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