Author: Simon Winchester Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 9780192805768 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 294
Book Description
"We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium -- the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it -- and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W.C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester's supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project -- a seventy-year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word-books, the world's unrivaled uber-dictionary. Book jacket."--Jacket.
Author: Simon Winchester Publisher: ISBN: Category : Criminally insane Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
W.C. Minor was one of the keenest volunteers involved in the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. What the OED's editor, James Murray, didn't realise was that he was also a millionaire American Civil War surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder.
Author: Pip Williams Publisher: Ballantine Books ISBN: 1984820737 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 417
Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review “A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages. Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world. WINNER OF THE AUSTRALIAN BOOK INDUSTRY AWARD
Author: Lynda Mugglestone Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300106992 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
Examines the hidden history through which the Oxford English Dictionary came into being in a study that traces the personal battles involved in chronicling an ever-changing language.
Author: Simon Winchester Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0670785369 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 82
Book Description
Earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. Headline-making natural disasters with devastating consequences for millions of people. But what do we actually know about these literally earth-shaking events? New York Times bestselling author, explorer, journalist, and geologist Simon Winchester—who’s been shaken by earthquakes in New Zealand, skied through Greenland to help prove the theory of plate tectonics, and even charred the soles of his boots climbing a volcano—looks at the science, technology, and societal impact of these inter-connected natural phenomena. A master nonfiction storyteller, Winchester digs deep into the powerful natural forces that shape the earth, exploring the how and why of world-changing events from the 19th-century’s infamous volcanic eruption at Krakatoa and the earthquake that flattened San Francisco, to the 21st-century tsunamis that devastated Indonesia and Japan. It’s a gripping story about what happens when our seemingly unmovable planet shakes, explodes, and floods—all richly illustrated with fascinating historical and stunning contemporary photographs.
Author: Joan Amon Amorganda Publisher: Partridge Publishing Singapore ISBN: 1543751318 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 390
Book Description
Inspired to Travel; Travel to Inspire – A Travel Memoir describes the author’s many travels and life journey. Coming from a very provincial background, she persisted to follow her passion and eventually fulfilled her dreams to travel and explore other countries and experience other cultures. Joan believes that if she can inspire one other soul to follow his/her dream by reading this book, then the author has fulfilled one more of her own dreams.
Author: Kel Richards Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 1460713257 Category : True Crime Languages : en Pages : 229
Book Description
The astonishing story of James Hardy Vaux, writer of Australia's first dictionary and first true-crime memoir If you wear 'togs', tell a 'yarn', call someone 'sly', or refuse to 'snitch' on a friend then you are talking like a convict. These words, and hundreds of others, once left colonial magistrates baffled and police confused. So comprehensible to us today, the flash language of criminals and convicts had marine officer Watkin Tench complaining about the need for an interpreter in the colonial court. Luckily, by 1811, that man was at hand. James Hardy Vaux - conman, pickpocket, absconder and thief, born into comfortable circumstances in England - was so drawn to a life of crime he was transported to Australia ... not once, but three times! Vaux's talents, glibness and audacity were extraordinary, and perceiving an opportunity to ingratiate himself with authorities during his second sentence, he set about writing a dictionary of the criminal slang of the colony, which was recognised for its uniqueness and taken back to England to be published. Kel Richards tells Vaux's story brilliantly, with the help of Vaux's own extraordinarily candid memoir of misdeeds - one of the first true-crime memoirs ever published. Kel's book combines two of his favourite subjects: the inventiveness, humour and origins of Australian English, and our history of fabulous, disreputable characters. With echoes of The Surgeon of Crowthorne as well as Oliver Twist, Flash Jim is a ripping read - especially for those who appreciate the power of words and the convict contribution to our idiom. PRAISE 'James Hardy Vaux was a con-man with a talent for words who wrote the first dictionary of Australian English. Kel Richards is a word-man with a talent for telling a stirring story about the con-man. In Flash Jim Kel Richards brings James Hardy Vaux to life as we haven't seen him before' - Emeritus Professor Roland Sussex, School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Queensland 'An engaging tale from a great student of our language about one of the conmen who gave Australia its character - and its distinctive slang' - Andrew Bolt, broadcaster and columnist 'One of the strongest bonds binding the people of Australia together is the Australian language. We speak a dialect of English richer and more colourful than most. When we call someone a "hoon" or invite a friend to a "barbie" we know immediately what we're talking about - but we have to translate for overseas visitors. This powerful cultural bond was, as Kel explains, built on four foundations. And the most colourful of those four was convict slang. The role that it played, and still plays, in the Australian language, and the story of the man who first recorded it is - as we used to say - a "ripping yarn". It makes a page-turning story' - Alan Jones, broadcaster and columnist 'There's never been a more important time to truly understand our Australian history and this book is a great introduction to the richness of our language and a wonderful window onto the real life of colonial Australia from my favourite wordsmith, Kel Richards' - Peta Credlin, broadcaster and columnist
Author: Simon Winchester Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061795887 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ("Elegant and scrupulous"—New York Times Book Review) and Krakatoa ("A mesmerizing page-turner"—Time) brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world's most technologically advanced country. No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever-enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind's most familiar innovations—including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper—often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war-torn China to far-flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people. After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country's long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single-handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one-man encyclopedist ever. Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham's remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great—related by one of the world's inimitable storytellers.
Author: Simon Winchester Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062652575 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 416
Book Description
“Another gem from one of the world’s justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people.” — Booklist (starred review) The revered New York Times bestselling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement—precision—in a superb history that is both an homage and a warning for our future. The rise of manufacturing could not have happened without an attention to precision. At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England, standards of measurement were established, giving way to the development of machine tools—machines that make machines. Eventually, the application of precision tools and methods resulted in the creation and mass production of items from guns and glass to mirrors, lenses, and cameras—and eventually gave way to further breakthroughs, including gene splicing, microchips, and the Hadron Collider. Simon Winchester takes us back to origins of the Industrial Age, to England where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. It was Thomas Jefferson who later exported their discoveries to the fledgling United States, setting the nation on its course to become a manufacturing titan. Winchester moves forward through time, to today’s cutting-edge developments occurring around the world, from America to Western Europe to Asia. As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
Author: Simon Winchester Publisher: Penguin UK ISBN: 0141926236 Category : Nature Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
Simon Winchester's brilliant chronicle of the destruction of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 charts the birth of our modern world. He tells the story of the unrecognized genius who beat Darwin to the discovery of evolution; of Samuel Morse, his code and how rubber allowed the world to talk; of Alfred Wegener, the crack-pot German explorer and father of geology. In breathtaking detail he describes how one island and its inhabitants were blasted out of existence and how colonial society was turned upside-down in a cataclysm whose echoes are still felt to this day.
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Author: Simon Winchester
Author: Simon Winchester
Author: Pip Williams
Author: Lynda Mugglestone
Author: Simon Winchester
Author: Joan Amon Amorganda
Author: Kel Richards
Author: Simon Winchester
Author: Simon Winchester
Author: Simon Winchester