Read Harder Challenge: Solar System, Professor and the Madman, Lives They Left Behind

Reviews by Ambrea

I have three more books to add to my list for the Read Harder Challenge:

1.      Read a nonfiction book about science.

2.      Read a book originally published in the decade you were born.

3.      Read a book with a main character that has a mental illness.

First on my list is How to Read the Solar System:  A Guide to the Stars and Planets by Chris North and Paul Abel, who host The Sky at Night on BBC.  I’m actually really glad I finished this book, because it offered me insight into the solar system that I simply didn’t have prior to reading North and Abel’s collaborative book.  While it is a bit dry and quite dense, I should point out that How to Read the Solar System is not a bad book.

I mean, I was sometimes very bored with the book when the authors went into great detail about how amateur astronomers should find a specific location in space—like how to find a particular moon by Jupiter, or which filter to use in order to observe the sun (helpful, if I understood where one might find such filters.  Or if my telescope worked properly), or pinpointing the exact degree to which one might adjust a telescope to find Venus—and I found myself losing interest.  Quickly.

I’m not saying it wasn’t a good book.  I learned something interesting about each of the planets and all the different heavenly bodies that inhabit space, which was an important aspect of reading this book.  For instance, I learned that Io, one of Jupiter’s many moons, has tectonic activity (specifically cryovolcanic activity, since it’s an icy wasteland); sound waves travel faster through plasma, which gives scientists the opportunity to measure the internal activity of the sun (since it’s made up of plasma); and meteor showers are essentially the debris left behind by comets, like a dust storm that the Earth passes through during its orbit.

I enjoyed actually learning something new, even if it’s not quite as useful as one might hope.  Like I said, it’s not a bad book.  Just a little dry and dense and, dare I say it, pedantic.  It’s not something I would read twice, but it’s a vast well of information that’s sure to hold appeal for readers who greatly enjoy science, astronomy, technology, and even mathematics.  It’s definitely worth checking out, especially if you’re curious about the solar system and the explorations humankind has made.  More importantly, it gets points in my book for having an index, so I was able to easily look up the most intriguing bits of information.

Next, I looked at The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester, which was more in line with my purview.  Titled The Surgeon of Crowthorne when it was originally published in Britain, Winchester’s book underwent a slight change when it migrated over to the United States, becoming The Professor and the Madman—which was accompanied by the glorious subtitle, A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.  I mean, how could I not be the tiniest bit enticed?

The Professor and the Madman is a story about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (otherwise known as the OED), specifically one of the most prolific contributors in its history:  Dr. William Chester Minor.  Minor was a surgeon during the American Civil War, who traveled to England and, eventually, found himself convicted of murder and put into a sanitarium; however, during his stint at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, he stumbled across a call for contributors to the OED.  After contacting Professor James Murray, who oversaw the entire project, he began to offer definitions, quotations, and etymology slips for the OED.  He send thousands of paper slips to Oxford, before his death in 1920, and he quickly became one of their most productive contributors.

As crazy as it might seem, it’s all very true.

Like Eric Larson—who has written Devil in the White City, Dead Wake, and Thunderstruck—Winchester has a narrative quality to his work that makes it appealing without compromising the facts of history.  Winchester pulls from a variety of resources, including medical documents from Broadmoor, correspondence between Professor Murray and Dr. Minor and others involved in the OED, as well as several historical texts.  He uses information to benefit the story, supplying an electrifying narrative while, simultaneously, feeding its readers the true and unaltered facts.  It’s all very, very good, and I highly recommend it.

As for my final book, I read The Lives They Left Behind:  Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic by Darby Penney and Peter Stastny.  Although I suspect this final category, which recommends reading a book with a main character who has a mental illness, is referring to a fictional novel rather than a nonfiction narrative, I decided to run with ambiguous wording and read something not about one character with a mental illness, but ten.

The Lives They Left Behind explores the lives of Willard State Hospital patients who were admitted to the hospital during the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.  Penney and Stastny provide an in-depth look at some of the permanent residents at Willard, as well as offer a glimpse at the big picture of mental/psychiatric care during its most formative years.  The book also provides photographs and illustrations that further illuminate the care patients received, and what sort of trials they went through with their mental illness—or perceived mental illness.

Altogether, I found it to be a fascinating book.  It’s an examination of psychiatric care that provides history and statistics, which can prove to be a bit dull, but it also connects on an emotional level and delivers nuggets of truth that are sometimes like a punch in the gut.  It’s a tough read sometimes.  For instance, I had a hard time reading about the electroshock therapy that often caused patients to have convulsions, or the medications which were prescribed that often did more harm than good—or, worse, how some patients were treated even if they didn’t suffer from a psychiatric disease.

Patients, like Ethel Smalls or Margaret Dunleavy, were most likely suffering from other conditions rather than a mental disorder.  Ethel Smalls likely suffered from PTSD after losing her children and spending years on the receiving end of her husband’s temper, enduring years of abuse that left her in a fragile state.  Likewise, Margaret Dunleavy was hospitalized after an uncharacteristic outburst due to a personal tragedy and chronic, debilitating pain.  Neither woman displayed the usual characteristics of a mental disorder, rather they were hospitalized because they were inconvenient.  It’s a heartbreaking fact that gives the book an undercurrent of tragedy that shocked me.

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester

 Reviewed by Ambrea

“It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters.  The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions.  But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story—a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this history undertaking,” reads the book jacket of The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.

And it is the story of two men:  Professor James Murray, an educator at Oxford and editor at the OED project, and Dr. William Chester Minor, a military surgeon who served in the American Civil War and became a prolific contributor to the dictionary.  Minor submitted thousands of neat, handwritten quotations for use by the Oxford English Dictionary (or OED) and offered hundreds of etymology slips to track the origins of words; however, he wasn’t a traditional contributor.

Minor was a patient at Broadmoor in Crowthorne, a mental institution in the English countryside for the criminally insane.  He was incarcerated until “Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known” after he murdered George Merritt, an Irish day laborer, in a delusional haze.  Despite his indefinite imprisonment, he and Murray, who was head editor of the OED at the time, struck up an unusual and rather unconventional relationship—and kindled a shared obsession—that helped make the dictionary an incredibly prolific and vast repository of the English language.

I was pleasantly surprised by The Professor and the Madman.  I’d seen it in passing once when I was collecting a stack of books and, of course, the subtitle caught my attention almost immediately:  A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary.  I mean, how could I not be intrigued?  What did murder have to do with the creation of the OED—and who was the madman supposedly involved?

I certainly had to find out, and I was quickly enchanted by the story of Professor Murray and Dr. Minor.

Professor James Murray and Dr. William Chester Minor were both brilliant individuals.  Intelligent and bright and astonishingly innovative, they were the backbone of the Oxford English Dictionary for a number of years, but they walked two very different paths.  Minor was a man of means, a gentlemen of substantial wealth who spent his childhood on Ceylon (what is known today as Sri Lanka), before traveling to the United States and enrolling at Yale.  He earned his degree as a doctor and joined the Army as a medical surgeon, participating in American Civil War, which left an indelible mark on him, possibly spurring his bout of madness that eventually landed him in Broadmoor.

Professor Murray, on the other hand, had a far more humble upbringing.  Born in Denholm, Scotland, Murray received only a rudimentary education, before he was forced to leave school to help support his family; however, his voracious appetite for learning encouraged him to continue his education and he learned several languages, including German, French, Dutch, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin, among others.  He worked as a teacher, an administrator at the Chartered Bank of India, a curator at the British Museum, before he became one of the most notable scholars at Oxford and editor for the OED.  (As an interesting aside, he trained local cattle to respond to him when he spoke to them in Latin—a curious trick that made him an intriguing individual in my book.)

Part narrative and part biography, The Professor and the Madman describes how these two individuals, who grew up in very different worlds, eventually became acquainted when Minor discovered the dictionary project and struck up a correspondence that lasted more than twenty years.  Simon Winchester’s book is an interesting creation, reminiscent of Erik Larson’s works in that it manages to make history sparkle, so to speak.  It makes history accessible and, sometimes, amusing, taking something that’s sometimes dry and stale, making it into a fascinating and informative epic.  Personally, I loved every bit of it.  It appealed to my love of language and my love of history, offering glimpses into both the creation and the history of the English language and the motivation behind one of the language’s most comprehensive books.

Yes, I found it was sometimes slow going.  (I’m very prone to distraction, I’m afraid, and I had a lot of books on my mind at the time.)  However, I was intrigued and enchanted by The Professor and the Madman.  It borders on light reading, meaning it isn’t dense and overwrought; moreover, it didn’t bog me down with unnecessary details or overwhelming passages of history.  It gives you all the best parts and, best of all, it reads like a novel.  More to the point, I found Winchester’s book wasn’t very grim.  Yes, Dr. Minor was entirely mad; yes, he was put in an asylum for the criminally insane; and, yes, his psychosis was alarming and sometimes violent (i.e. the murder of George Merritt), but I found it wasn’t particularly graphic or stomach-churning.  The bit about “self-abuse” and self-mutilation did make me feel a bit squeamish, but it’s only a short, violent section in an otherwise delightful book.

Overall, I enjoyed reading The Professor and the Madman.  Wonderfully detailed and remarkably crafted—and incredibly precise—Winchester’s book is a fantastic read.  It appealed to me on so many levels as a reader by making the English language and its history accessible and, more importantly, telling a richly woven story about Murray and Minor that opened my eyes to a new aspect of history.  While others might not find it as amusing or interesting as I did, I think all readers will be able to appreciate the effort and skill Winchester puts into this incredible book.