Title: Great story ruined by bad writing
Product review: I loved Krakatoa, the only Winchester book I'd read before this, and I'm fascinated by language history and evolution, so I had high hopes for this. I was disappointed. I had noticed Winchester's tendency to lapse into flowery, overwritten prose in Krakatoa, but apparently when he wrote The Professor and the Madman he hadn't yet learned any control over it at all. This pompous style makes the elementary usage errors and sloppy style with which the book is riddled even more irritating. What is his editor's excuse, I'd like to know?There's an interesting story here, and on the level of the entire book it's actually structured very well. I love Winchester's digressive writing style--at its best, it conveys an invigorating curiosity about the world and an almost childlike enthusiasm that's contagious. For me, though, the execrable prose style kept the book from being enjoyable--and given the position of strength it was coming from, that was a big disappointment.
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