“A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary”

Being a self-proclaimed word nerd, this book initially piqued my interest several months ago when I saw it on the shelves of the “Books about Books” section of my local booksellers.

I acquired the necessary funds (usually from the dearth of Bookstore Gift Cards I get for Christmas and Birthdays from relatives who know little about me beyond the fact that I read like a fiend), purchased the book, and finally picked it up.

The Professor and the Madman tells the interwoven tale of James Murray, editor for 21 of the nearly 80 years it took to produce the OED, and W.C. Minor, one of the Dictionary’s most productive and most mysterious contributors. Murray sets off to visit the man who has expended so much time and effort and contributed so greatly to the creation of the OED, and is shocked to discover once he reaches what he believes to be Minor’s vast estate that the estate is actually the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, and W.C. Minor is actually an inmate. Though the author, Simon Winchester, goes on to debunk the myth of Murray and Minor’s first meeting, he seems to find no problem in using it as a draw for the first few chapters and in the blurb.

Well, that’s the premise, but there’s not really much more to the story than that, though Winchester manages to pad it out to 230 pages. It’s an interesting story and very well researched, but Winchester seems to touch on things superficially and defer to speculation over hard facts to keep up the intrigue (perhaps a traumatic experience in the U.S. Army during the Civil War was the trigger for Minor’s delusions, maybe he had an affair with the wife of the man he murdered (after the murder, when she visited him at Broadmoor)).

The real shame is that this story is fascinating, for the right audience, but the facts should be able to speak for themselves. One of Winchester’s main problems seems to be that he doesn’t trust his readers enough to let them draw their own conclusions. His style is heavy handed at points, but didn’t bother me overmuch until the end. He spends a good portion of the last chapter and the entire postscript expounding on how tragic the story is. Well, had he conveyed that in the story, that whole treacle-y mess would be unnecessary.

As it stands, the entire thing comes off as mighty self-indulgent: the superficial exploration of schizophrenia (Minor’s most likely modern diagnosis; what is sanity anyway?); the Postscript in which he explains his somewhat cryptic dedication (to Minor’s murder victim. Why not just use his name instead of initials, then?); the Author’s Note; the Acknowledgements (6 pages); suggestions for Further Reading (which recommends books on tangential topics like the American Civil War, and little more about the OED); meet Simon Winchester; a Few of Simon Winchester’s Favorite Words; an excerpt from his forthcoming book (I find these much easier to stomach when it is the author’s style, and not his story, I want to read more of. Anyone can find a good story. Not anyone can write it well.); “Have You Read?” More books by the Author.

You get the idea. How much of this do we need?

Perhaps some of these unnecessary additions are the fault of the publisher trying to boost sales. But when you read some of the sensationalist titles of Winchester’s other books (The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology; Krakatoa: the Day the World Exploded), I can’t help but think Winchester was at the very least complicit in all of it.

Amazon tells me Winchester has written a sequel of sorts (The Meaning of Everything: the Creation of the Oxford English Dictionary) that focuses more on the actual Dictionary (the part of this book I found more interesting, anyhow). Perhaps this would be a better choice for the hard-core word nerds that were attracted to this book for the OED’s sake, in the first place.

Final judgment: Interesting, but fluffy. A good beach read for a bibliophile, but borrow it or get from the library. Winchester’s ego doesn’t need the boost a sales spike might give him.

It should go without saying that we hold Julia Child near and dear to our hearts around these parts. And not the least because an entire network owns their existence to her. For us, it’s more personal. Growing up, there was something about her show (and to a lesser degree Yan Can Cook and Jeff Smith - The Frugal Gourmet [despite those sexual harrassment rumors]) that brought cooking alive.

I’d see my mom in the kitchen slaving away at dinner or for a party and then I’d watch those shows and the disconnect between the ease with which they were making food and the sometimes struggle of my mom to bring a meal to the table was too wide for my feable brain to understand as anything more than unusual. If they could do it, why couldn’t we all do it?

And that is the central premise for which all cooking shows operate under. No matter your skill level as a chef, and let’s be honest you’re skill level is pretty abysmal, in theory you should be able to prepare the slow braised pork shoulder Texas-style chilli laddled over corn pudding.

And yet we can’t. Or won’t. But it’s comforting to watch someone do it and think to ourselves, shit under the right circumstances and given enough energy I could do that. I could if I just tried. Except we never do, so why kid ourselves.

Enter Julie Powell. A 30 year-old government secretary. At the moment her life begins to fall apart: she can’t bear children, her marriage is on the rocks and her job is unfulfilling, Powell goes back home and discovers Julia Childs.

Specifically, her seminal cookbook, Mastering The Art of French Cooking. Hiding underneath a dust film, tucked into the back of her mother’s closet is the book that will end up saving her life. For in the moment Powell discovers the book a pilgrammage begins; one that will test her sanity, her pluckishness, but ultimately make her life infinitely better.

Julie Powell decides to cook every single recipes in that 1961 cookbook over the course of the year and chronicles those madcap adventures in Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.

Readers follow along, as the project starts innocently enough and builds steam to the point where Powell makes appearances on news shows and becomes something of a quasi-celebrity. Along the way she debones duck, kills lobsters, learns to flip omelettes, breaks sauces and becomes a pretty decent cook.

What’s particularly inspiring, if you want to use that word, is the way that Powell takes ownership of her life over the year spent cooking. It brings her closer to her friends, brings her a bit of infamy, brings her closer to her husband all through the power of food.

Powell handles her journey with a funny hand, always more than willing to deprecate herself. That she treats herself with the same scrutiny she does the other people in her life is a bit refreshing, even if at times she comes off as a bit shrillish. If anything, Powell’s ability to make herself the butt of every joke only makes her more endearing as a literary creation.

Of course, I won’t give away much. But suffice it to say, this is an enjoyably quick read. It’s great if you’re taking stock of your own life and wondering how the hell is this going to get better?!? Much like the cooking shows we love to watch, it’s more important to maintain an illusion that things are getting better even if maybe they’re not. The bring-it-all-home ending, in which Julia Child is obituaried by Julie Powell is touchingly sweet. Here was a someone Powell had never met, but whom ended up meaning so much to her life.

Funny how that works out.

Buy: Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
Also: Interviews with Gothamist and Powell’s Books and something Julie Powell wrote for the NY Times

Ralph Steadman is best known as the illustrator for Hunter S. Thompson. He does these wildly chicken scratch ink and watercoolers that are just mild melting. It’s truly like nothing else out there.But something you might have known is that Steadman is also a wine lover. Untrodden Grapes is part exploration of wine, part travelogue, part illustrated coffee table book. Steadman definitely cuts through the pretentions of wine, but at the same time he wants to rescue wine from the homogenization of it.

Divorced from their natural outlet as a local product, they have entered the domain, the appellation of the designer, whose fanciful attractions urge us to try something rather natty from the Rhone because he thought it appropraite to design the label as a weeping rock face, sprouting algae like the bottom of a village pond.

Wine tasters talk of blackberry and apple, butter and caramel, damp caves, toast, and cranberries. Even pomegranate - who the hell eats pomegranates? Or Ugli fruits? And eucalyptus bark!

Winemakers throughout the world have had to adopt the supermarket mentality if they intend to stay in business, otherwise they would never survive.

Only someone who loves something can adequately praise and villify simulataneously. Steadman does that, and he takes you to some of the finest winemaking regions of the world and supplies countless anecdotes. It’s not a comprehensive bible of wine, but it’s a personal acount of one man’s love expressed through picture and word.

Ambience can affect the most indifferent wine and is the one ingredient that only the imbiber can add, along with his or her chosen friends. Therein lies the hidden dimension of wine, its inspiration and its “raisin d’etre.”

And if you don’t feel like reading it just look at the illustrations. You won’t find a cooler coffee table book on wine.

When I’m looking for something breezy to read the first person I always ask for recommendations is my dad. The guy has read more detective fiction, more lawyerly novels, more “plausible” sci-fi actioners than just about anyone I know. I’m pretty convinced if he wanted to he could write one of these novels in his sleep.

Once, he was reading a book by Chuck Hogan titled Prince of Thieves and I joked, “what is that some kind of Robin Hood novel?”

Little did I know that in the future people would use this same joke on me except whenever it happened I had the distinct urge to punch them in the face.

But I digress. No, it’s not about Robin Hood, he said. It’s about bank robbers from The Town.

Ahhh. And yes, that is Cliff’s version of Hogan’s existential novel about bank robbers from Charlestown, Mass. Set in 1996, on the dawn of the internet and computer revolution and gentrification in Boston, when robbing banks was a somewhat plausible career choice, Prince of Thieves isn’t so much about bank robbers as it is about one in particular. We’ll get to that in a second.

We pick up the story in Kenmore Square at a local Bay Bank (which would get bought by Fleet Bank and that would in turn get eaten up by Bank of America and that’s today’s lesson on bank mergers in Boston over the last decade), it’s getting robbed by four professionals, who are meticulous and careful. But just when everything seems to be going well, one of the robbers goes mental and beats down the bank manager. We’ve got a loose canon - any chance his loose canonness will come back to hurt the gang in the end?

Anyway, the robbers get away and first to arrive on the scene is FBI Agent Adam Frawley (think Ed Norton). He’s a bank robbing specialist and is determined to bring this crew down. The cat and mouse game is complicated even further when both Frawley and Townie crew leader Doug MacRay fall for the same damaged bank employee, Claire Keesey.

What could come off as pap turns into a somewhat cliche plotted yarn, but one that is a page turner nonetheless. Hogan layers his characters with baggage so severe you wonder if the weight of it will crash them into the abyss. Central to all this is Doug MacRay.

A former Townie hockey star, MacRay is running from the ghosts of his father, the expectations of an insulated city, the pressure to hold his crew together, the temptation to drink again and the desire to get out from under the only life he’s ever known.

It’s all heady stuff and Hogan pulls it off so convincingly; the final denouement, a daytime heist of Fenway Park and a classic shoot’em up that is as gripping and tragic as the rest of the novel is smarter and tenser than most of the fiction in this genre.

You almost can’t wait for the film version, which is supposedly in production this year and being directed by Adrien Lynne. We mentioned Ed Norton, but if we could suggest reuniting Matt Damon, The Affleck Brothers and possibly throwing in a Leo DiCaprio here in Oysterland we’d be much obliged.