alt Hacker NewsSimon Winchester, Author of 'The Professor and the Madman,' Has Died
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He wrote a fantastic biography of Joseph Needham, a chemist at Cambridge who learned Chinese in his 30s and subsequently created an exhaustively thorough history of scientific discovery in ancient China that was published as a gigantic set of encyclopedias. The research into Needham's wartime travels in China (relying on university and Foreign Office archives) was top notch.
His book on small British holdings in the 90s, Outposts, was an amazing read. He was a gifted writer who could humanize without romantize.
My introduction to his work was Kraktoa: the Day the World Exploded. A fascinating read.
The madman kicked ass. A broken person can do unbroken work.
I can also recommend the movie named after the American title of his Oxford English Dictionary book.
> Simon Winchester was born in London on Sept. 28, 1944. He was the only child of Bernard and Andrée Winchester (de Wael.) By some accounts, his father, a British soldier, was imprisoned in Nazi Germany at the time of his son’s birth. In interviews, Mr. Winchester has frequently suggested that, when he returned from captivity, his father was not enthusiastic about his young son and sent him to boarding school in England at around the age of 5.
Or "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" if you don't want the dumbed-down-for-the-US-market title.
An important book; one of several that perhaps exists in part because of the room in the market that was carved out by Dava Sobel's Longitude.
Well, that sucks. He's one of my favorite authors. I recommend the audiobooks which he reads himself.
I especially liked "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" and "Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic".
But all of his works are great.