Title: History of the Dictionary
Product review: "This has been a story of an American soldier whose involvement in the making of the world's greatest dictionary was singular, astonishing, memorable and laudable - and yet at the same time wretchedly sad." - Prologue. Well, that certainly could have been the story. But what it was was a history of the dictionary (as in "the history of the horse") with W.C. Minor's contributions finally gotten to on page 116 or so. Winchester, the author of several other books I'll avoid, also seems to suffer from the common malady - or unwillingness - of not knowing how to end a book. So the last fifty pages sink the poor reader into...the history of insanity/dimentia/Alzeihmer's, whatever you want to call what Minor suffered. Whereas I should have shed a tear when the main character - assuming it wasn't a dictionary - was laid to rest at age 85, I was fairly glad to see him go.
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