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Title: The Surgeon of Crowthorne
Subtitle: The Murder, Mystery and Madness of the Oxford English Dictionary
Author: Simon Winchester
Narrator: Simon Winchester
Format: Unabridged
Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
Language: English
Release date: 11-24-17
Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks
Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime

Publisher's Summary:
The compiling of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental task. It took 50 years, even with the help of numerous contributors. Among the most prolific was William Chester Minor, who sent editor James Murray thousands of extracts.
On many occasions, Murray invited this mysterious correspondent to Oxford, but the invitation was always declined. Finally stirred by curiosity, Murray himself went to visit Minor. What he found was shocking: Minor lived in Broadmoor asylum. He was a millionaire, an expert on the English language, and a qualified surgeon, but he was imprisoned as a lunatic for murder.

Members Reviews:
A life: Profit or Loss?
THE SURGEON of CROWTHORNE
It's the story of the relationship between the Scottish man that headed the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary & the man that contributed the most as a volunteer layman to it's creation. The head of the project started life as a commoner & the layman was from a dynastic American family. The layman became a surgeon & served during the Revolutionary War. These opposites ring their lives & yet they spent 20 years working together on the OED (which took 70 years to finish) but never met until about 10 years into their collaboration on the project despite the fact they were but few miles apart. The Scot holds the place of one of the finest scholars that ever lived & the American descended into madness & killed an innocent Englishman in England due to his insanity. The American then spent all but the final 10 years of his life in a sanatorium, quite literally insane until his death in 1920 & the Scot did not know that his number one amateur contributor was in an asylum until ten years of collaboration had past. This, despite the fact they lived less than 45 miles apart.
The book is a contrast of their lives & a telling of their collaboration done in such a way as to be hypnotic. It also covers the difficulties of creating dictionaries but that is a side story. The contrast, comparison, confluence & inverted results of these two lives from their beginnings to their ends is told in a style that I can only compare to Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story. It is also a grander use of the English language than Paul used in my mind. I simply can't read it fast because I don't want to. I read a few pages, think about what's in them & then read a few more. I can't recommend it highly enough to those that like History & researched personal stories about those that lived through them. Two great & fascinating characters who you would never expect to meet each other, let alone becoming the cornerstones of a great undertaking that didn't end for seventy years. It's a good primer on those times too & certainly not an extremely long read.
The ending of the story is a paean to sadness, tragedy & loss amidst the creation & fulfillment of a great project that is today the foundation of communication of thoughts, ideas & understanding in the English language. The Author's Note at the end of the tale is not to be missed due to the accurate description of this tale & the impact on those involved.