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Books like The Professor and the Madman CD
An atmospheric dive into the Victorian obsession with language and the tragic, hidden genius that helped define it. These 12 books are the closest matches in mood, pace and themes, with what each one shares with The Professor and the Madman CD.
- Victorian
- intellectual
- shadowy
- melancholic
- 01
The meaning of everything
Simon Winchester · 2003
An engaging, anecdote-rich journey through the monumental, decades-long obsession required to catalog the English language.
- 02
Word by word
Kory Stamper
A joyful, irreverent romp through the obsessive and surprisingly messy world of dictionary-making.
- 03
The man who loved China
Simon Winchester · 2008
A sumptuous, globe-trotting biography that captures the thrill of intellectual obsession and the romance of uncovering a civilization's forgotten brilliance.
- 04
A dictionary of the English language
Samuel Johnson · 1819
An opinionated, deeply literary stroll through the eccentricities of the English language, guided by a brilliantly curmudgeonly scholar.
- 05
A Mind That Found Itself
Clifford Whittingham Beers · 1908
A lucid, harrowing dispatch from the depths of early twentieth-century psychiatric confinement that transforms personal suffering into a rallying cry for reform.
- 06
The strangest man
Graham Farmelo
An illuminating journey into the brilliant, contradictory mind of one of modern science's most enigmatic figures.
- 07
An unquiet mind
Kay Redfield Jamison · 1995
A fiercely articulate descent into the terrifying highs and crushing lows of a brilliant, fractured mind.
- 08
Library
Matthew Battles
A sweeping, novelistic journey through the triumphs and tragedies of human knowledge, celebrating the institutions that preserve our history while mourning those we have lost.
- 09
Shakespeare
Bill Bryson
A witty, conversational stroll through the scant facts and wild fictions surrounding history's most famous playwright.
- 10
Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell
Pull up a chair in a bustling 18th-century London tavern and listen to the greatest conversationalist of the age hold court.
- 11
The Innovators
Walter Isaacson
A sweeping, deeply human exploration of the collaborative genius that wired our modern world.
- 12
Letters of note
Shaun Usher
An intimate, voyeuristic stroll through centuries of human connection, captured in the private correspondence of the famous and the forgotten.
