Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman, has died
Simon Winchester, Author of 'The Professor and the Madman,' Has Died
Simon Winchester, best known for The Professor and the Madman, has died. Readers in the Hacker News thread remember him for Krakatoa, The Perfectionists, and Knowing What We Know, and recommend the audiobooks he narrated himself. One commenter notes his Oxford English Dictionary book was published in the UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne, and that it may owe part of its market to the path carved by Dava Sobel's Longitude.
Or "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" if you don't want the dumbed-down-for-the-US-market title. An important book; one of several that perhaps exists in part because of the room in the market that was carved out by Dava Sobel's Longitude.
- msisk6
Well, that sucks. He's one of my favorite authors. I recommend the audiobooks which he reads himself.
I especially liked "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" and "Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic".
But all of his works are great.
- ilamont
He wrote a fantastic biography of Joseph Needham, a chemist at Cambridge who learned Chinese in his 30s and subsequently created an exhaustively thorough history of scientific discovery in ancient China that was published as a gigantic set of encyclopedias. The research into Needham's wartime travels in China (relying on university and Foreign Office archives) was top notch.
- themadturk
Oh, that's too bad! I read my first Winchester, The Perfectionists, just this year, and a couple of other beside. Enjoyable and educational, the epitome of this type of non-fiction.
- jimbo456
His book on small British holdings in the 90s, Outposts, was an amazing read. He was a gifted writer who could humanize without romantize.
- moioci
My introduction to his work was Kraktoa: the Day the World Exploded. A fascinating read.