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The Professor and the Madman
- Narrated by: Simon Winchester
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
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By: Matthew Goodman
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Young Benjamin Franklin
- The Birth of Ingenuity
- By: Nick Bunker
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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From his early career as a printer and journalist to his scientific work and his role as a founder of a new republic, Benjamin Franklin has always seemed the inevitable embodiment of American ingenuity. But in his youth, he had to make his way through a harsh colonial world, where he fought many battles with his rivals, but also with his wayward emotions. Taking Franklin to the age of 41, when he made his first electrical discoveries, Bunker goes behind the legend to reveal the sources of his passion for knowledge.
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Good Book but LOTS of Names
- By Tim on 10-31-19
By: Nick Bunker
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The True History of the Elephant Man
- The Definitive Account of the Tragic and Extraordinary Life of Joseph Carey Merrick
- By: Michael Howell, Peter Ford
- Narrated by: Steve West
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Due to horrible physical deformities, he spent much of his life as a fairground freak. He was hounded, persecuted, and starving, until his fortune changed and he was rescued, housed, and fed by the distinguished surgeon, Frederick Treves. The subject of several books, a Broadway hit, and a film, Joseph Merrick has become part of popular mythology. Here, in this fully revised edition containing much fresh information, are the true and un-romanticized facts of his life.
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Amazing man!
- By Carolyn on 02-05-15
By: Michael Howell, and others
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Rush
- Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father
- By: Stephen Fried
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 22 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time he was 30, Dr. Benjamin Rush had signed the Declaration of Independence, edited Common Sense, toured Europe as Benjamin Franklin’s protégé, and become John Adams’s confidant, and was soon to be appointed Washington’s surgeon general. And as with the greatest Revolutionary minds, Rush was only just beginning his role in 1776 in the American experiment.
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The narration problem can be corrected
- By Sandra L. on 09-27-18
By: Stephen Fried
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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Colm Toibin
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Elegant, profound, and riveting, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways these men surface in their work. Through these stories of fathers and sons, Tóibín recounts the resistance to English cultural domination, the birth of modern Irish cultural identity, and the extraordinary contributions of these complex and masterful authors.
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Eminently re-readable
- By Ellen-A on 01-02-19
By: Colm Toibin
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Mark Twain
- A Life
- By: Ron Powers
- Narrated by: Ron Powers
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Abridged
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Mark Twain founded the American voice. His works are a living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. His awestruck contemporaries saw him as the representative figure of his times, and his influence has deeply flavored the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Buy the Book
- By W.Denis on 10-22-05
By: Ron Powers
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The Greater Journey
- Americans in Paris
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The Greater Journey is the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, architects, and others of high aspiration who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, ambitious to excel in their work.
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McCullough takes it to the next level
- By gregory m loyd on 07-12-11
By: David McCullough
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Nazi Literature in the Americas
- By: Roberto Bolaño, Chris Andrews - translator
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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A tour de force of black humor and imaginary erudition, Nazi Literature in the Americas presents itself as a biographical dictionary of writers who espoused extreme right-wing ideologies in the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Eerie and fascinating
- By Jikai Zenshin on 03-19-21
By: Roberto Bolaño, and others
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I Am Dynamite!
- A Life of Nietzsche
- By: Sue Prideaux
- Narrated by: Nicholas Guy Smith
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nietzsche wrote that all philosophy is autobiographical, and in this vividly compelling, myth-shattering biography, Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of this brilliant, eccentric, and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work. I Am Dynamite! is the essential biography for anyone seeking to understand history's most misunderstood philosopher.
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Fascinating; tragic
- By Cineaste21 on 12-30-18
By: Sue Prideaux
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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The House of Government
- A Saga of the Russian Revolution
- By: Yuri Slezkine, Claire Bloom - director
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 45 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction. The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment.
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Inside saga of the leaders of Bolshevism & the USSR
- By Edward V. Blanchard on 11-05-17
By: Yuri Slezkine, and others
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Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 20 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Jonathan Swift is best remembered today as the author of Gulliver’s Travels, the satiric fantasy that quickly became a classic and has remained in print for nearly three centuries. Yet Swift also wrote many other influential works, was a major political and religious figure in his time, and became a national hero, beloved for his fierce protest against English exploitation of his native Ireland. What is really known today about the enigmatic man behind these accomplishments? Can the facts of his life be separated from the fictions?
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JOHNATHAN SWIFT AND POWER OF THE PEN
- By chetyarbrough.blog on 09-30-14
By: Leo Damrosch
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Great subject, great writing, great voice
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Sarcastic
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Audiobook Version is the Best!
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Colorful anecdotes but tiring after a while.
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The Men Who United the States
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When it comes to climate-change-inspired threats, it is rising sea levels we hear most about. But if the oceans are, as Herman Melville put it, “the tide-beating heart of the Earth”, rivers are its circulatory system. In the United States, there is no river more storied, symbolic, and vital than the Mississippi, and none, to use Mark Twain’s word, more lawless. The struggle to control it has been going on nearly as long as there has been human civilization on its banks, and the attendant drama and dangers have been memorialized by many writers.
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Stunning Informative and Scarry as Hell
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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.
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turn your watch back 70 years
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A Crack in the Edge of the World
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San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America's relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet's most sudden and destructive force. In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of towns to its north-northwest and the south-southeast were overcome by an enormous shaking that was compounded by the violent shocks of an earthquake, registering 8.25 on the Richter scale.
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7 Hours and 45 minutes . . .
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The Perfectionists
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The New York Times best-selling 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.
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Somewhat less than perfect
- By enya keshet on 06-19-18
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Atlantic
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Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Spanning the ocean's story, from its geological origins to the age of exploration, from World War II battles to today's struggles with pollution and overfishing, Winchester's narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring.
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Starts Better Than it Finishes
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Alice Behind Wonderland
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On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation - as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature.
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Not Long Enough
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Destiny of the Republic
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James A. Garfield may have been the most extraordinary man ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked Garfield down and shot him in the back. But the shot didn’t kill Garfield. The drama of what happened subsequently is a powerful story of a nation in turmoil.
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Marvelous, Magnificent, Millard
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Pacific
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Best-selling author Simon Winchester offers an enthralling biography of the Pacific Ocean and its role in the modern world, exploring our relationship with this imposing force of nature. Winchester's personal experience is vast and his storytelling second to none. And his historical understanding of the region is formidable, making Pacific a paean to this magnificent sea of beauty, myth, and imagination that is transforming our lives.
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Political Asides Have Become Bombastic Didactic
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Outposts
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Originally published in 1985, Outposts is Simon Winchester's journey to find the vanishing empire, "on which the sun never sets". In the course of a three-year, 100,000 mile journey - from the chill of the Antarctic to the blue seas of the Caribbean, from the South of Spain and the tip of China to the utterly remote specks in the middle of gale-swept oceans - he discovered such romance and depravity, opulence and despair that he was inspired to write what may be the last contemporary account of the British empire.
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Nice Travelogue
- By J. S. Koehler on 01-28-06
By: Simon Winchester
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The Fracture Zone
- A Return to the Balkans
- By: Simon Winchester
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
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Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans. Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region. Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago. When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.
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Loved this-Great combo:Story and History Explained
- By Jeremy on 07-10-14
By: Simon Winchester
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The Dictionary People
- The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
- By: Sarah Ogilvie
- Narrated by: Joan Walker, Sarah Ogilvie
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
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The Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others.
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Delicious and important
- By Bill. Thirdson on 11-15-23
By: Sarah Ogilvie
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Hero of the Empire
- The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill
- By: Candice Millard
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
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At age 24 Winston Churchill was utterly convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister of England one day, despite the fact he had just lost his first election campaign for Parliament. He believed that to achieve his goal, he had to do something spectacular on the battlefield. Despite deliberately putting himself in extreme danger as a British army officer in colonial wars in India and Sudan and as a journalist covering a Cuban uprising against the Spanish, glory and fame had eluded him.
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Far More Than Simply, Hero of the Empire!
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What listeners say about The Professor and the Madman
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-16-20
Amazing
A fascinating story of two great protagonists who played a decisive role in one of the most ambitious projects since the invention of printing.
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- J.B.
- 05-28-20
Understand Insanity and How To Write A Dictionary
The Professor and the Madman, written and verbalized by Simon Winchester. I read the story some around 2003 and enjoyed it marvelously. I just thought I would do it again, so hello Audible. The book is poetic although written in prose. There is, of course, this unique story of a mentally ill murderer becoming a grade-A number one contributor to the 74-year effort to write the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Rather, more about that later, but my joy came from learning about the uniqueness of the OED and how its completion process makes it even today a premier dictionary or written compilation of our English language.
Don’t get me wrong, the tale of the strange circumstance of the madman is entertaining. There are hints here that his madness is PTD, acquired during his service as a surgeon during the Civil War Wilderness battle, the first encounter between the armies of Grant versus Lee and the bloody loss of 5000 soldiers. Was the madness causational? There was also a back story that the madman’s evangelistic parents embedded too muck self- guilt in this nympho-istic psychologically weak man. There are hints but not substance. I must be a bore as opposed to all that psychiatry; I found the real jewel in the story to be the understanding of the importance of the OED. Whichever aspect of the book you prefer you cannot help but thrill during the read or listen. One issue. The story is more of a short story than a major novel. In an effort to fill the pages, the author adds a lot of unnecessary extras. No concern though. Still worth the one credit. Well worth the one credit.
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- Drew B.
- 04-08-17
Fascinating history of Oxford dictionary
Very interesting history of the Oxford English Dictionary. The title led me to believe it would read more like a mystery novel which it definitely is not. The story revolves around the genesis of the OED and is very well written albeit the title is slightly misleading. Fun to listen to.
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- Mara
- 02-03-17
Fascinating read
This was selected for a book club read. As an unabashed Anglophile and lover of words, this book was right up my alley. Add to that, I'm a case worker for mentally ill and homeless individuals - so the piece about dealing with "lunacy" in the late 1800s was fascinating to me. There were a few twists to the story that had me shocked and laughing at various times. Even the way the British accent sounds stuffy and judgmental in a lighthearted way is amusing to me, a twanging Texan.
I gave it a 4-star review overall because, while it definitely appealed to me, I can see why it would be tedious to others. There is a long discussion about the debate over the definition of protagonist and whether a story can have two protagonists that even I felt cross-eyed at contemplating. While absolutely necessary, I can also see where some might have jumped ship with the discussions on how the great dictionary was organized.
Most of the people in my book club ended up listening to the audiobook instead of reading it, and I believe that had made the experience all the more enjoyable for me.
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- J. BamaSax
- 01-23-17
Extremely enlightening view about the Dictionary.
Very historically entertaining accounts of how the Oxford-English Dictionary came to be. LOVED IT! Anyone who likes history could be a fan of this book. It spans from early 1800's England to officers in the Civil War between the states. I would suggest not looking up the men in this book as it would spoil some of the fun of the narrative.
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- Marianne
- 09-18-16
Fascinating tale of the Anglo/American cooperation
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes, for people who love words and their origins, as well as a fascinating story beautifully told. The reader was worthy of the writer.
What did you like best about this story?
It shed light on a subject I know little about
Which character – as performed by Simon Winchester – was your favorite?
All, he is a fantastic reader!
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
too long
Any additional comments?
a delight
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- Midwest Andy
- 01-24-17
Dry in Parts, but an Interesting Story
If you could sum up The Professor and the Madman in three words, what would they be?
Dictionaries, Lunatics, History
What was the most compelling aspect of this narrative?
That it was a true story.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
No. The chapters about the history of dictionaries are dry.
Any additional comments?
An interesting piece of history, though the author works petty hard to make the crime sound more lurid and interesting than it was. The book is about an hour shorter than advertised because the acknowledgement section is an hour long and deathly boring.
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- R. Jones
- 03-20-17
terrific listen
I really enjoyed this book. It being read by the author makes it all the better. A very compelling story!
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- Relix
- 03-26-21
Fascinating!
As a lifelong lover of words, their meanings, and their histories, I had no doubt that I would find this book extremely interesting. In spite of this though, I was surprised at just how fascinating this book turned out to be. Easily, one of my top five favorite books of all time.
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- Gene Strother
- 12-28-21
Fascinating
The story of the two friends is one marvelous thing. The story of the Oxford English Dictionary is another. If you love words, I suspect you will love this.
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