 |
|
|
![[Salon Book Awards]](/special/1998/12/bookawards/src/21sba_header_back.gif){kind=small} | ||||
Nonfiction
- - - - - - - - - - - Table Talk Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - -
|  |  |  | 
It took nearly 70 years to complete work on the "Oxford English Dictionary," one of the signal achievements of English letters. Tens of thousands of scholars and committed readers took part in compiling its 414,825 exacting definitions. In "The Professor and the Madman," gifted journalist Simon Winchester chronicles not only the painstaking labors behind the publication of the OED but unearths the strange and absorbing life story of one of its major contributors -- an American surgeon named Dr. William Chester Minor, who mailed in his work from an asylum for the criminally insane. In Winchester's capable hands, this saga fascinates on many levels -- it's a book about the history of the English language, about changing notions of what insanity means and about the unlikely friendship between the OED's editor, Professor James Murray, and his most unusual contributor. "The Professor and Madman" is a history lesson that reads like a detective novel. "The Professor and the Madman":
Princeton in the late 1940s and '50s was to mathematicians what Paris in the '20s was to writers and artists, host to Einstein, Godel, Oppenheimer and John von Neumann. Among the university's elite students was John Nash, a tall, handsome and preternaturally gifted native of West Virginia, who struck his fellow students as "immensely strange" and detached. Nash's remarkable genius (his theory, the Nash equilibrium, would revolutionize von Neumann's game theory) eventually won him a Nobel Prize, but not before he spent decades in the grip of schizophrenia, reduced to "a phantom who haunted Princeton," convinced that extraterrestrials were sending him messages through the New York Times. His recovery was as miraculous as his genius itself. Sylvia Nasar's lucid, engaging account of Nash's rise, fall and resurrection is as scrupulously researched as the other, heftier biographies of better-known public figures published this year -- but it's much more readable and fascinating. Nasar skillfully illuminates one mysterious realm after another -- theoretical mathematics, the scientific cabals of the Cold War and finally madness itself -- as she follows the course of this extraordinary and dramatic life. "A Beautiful Mind":
Reports on the wicked doings of the rich, famous and blue-blooded have a well-known, if rarely well-thought-of, allure. Seldom, however, are accounts of bad behavior in high places written with the erudition, sophistication and wit that Francine du Plessix Gray brings to her book about the private life of the man who gave sadism its name. The delights of "At Home With the Marquis de Sade" are decidedly voyeuristic (neither the socialites dished in Vanity Fair nor the characters portrayed in Christian Slater movies can equal the 18th century French aristocracy for epic depravity), but they're also historical, philosophical and surprisingly comic. Vain, petulant and spoiled, the Marquis according to Gray is the flip side of the celebrated rational enlightenment of his age, but for all his obsession with violent erotic mastery, he hardly amounts to a serious dark side -- Sade's rare attempts to realize his rigid, methodical fantasies invariably ended in disaster. "At Home with the Marquis De Sade":
In the fall of 1991, Beth Kephart's 2-and-a-half-year-old son, Jeremy, was diagnosed with "pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified" -- a maddeningly generic label for a wide range of difficulties, including autistic features. There is nothing generic, however, about Kephart's calm, observant and deeply moving account of her family's life before and after that diagnosis. As Kephart and her husband learn that Jeremy is "different in a million wonderful ways, and also different in ways that need our help," "A Slant of Sun" becomes a potent meditation on what it means to be "normal" in American society. To remark that there are lessons here for every parent -- lessons about paying attention, lessons about patience -- isn't putting it strongly enough. There are lessons here for everyone about, quite simply, what it means to be fully alive. "A Slant of Sun":
By now the Holocaust has been so analyzed, memorialized and debated that we've encased the fearsome heart of it in words. The numbing effect of that intellectualization becomes fully clear after an encounter with Philip Gourevitch's account of the devastating and systematic 1994 massacre of the Tutsi minority by the Hutu majority in Rwanda. He offers us a vision of genocide in its unvarnished, unsymbolic insanity and horror. From a muddy cultural brew of leftover colonial racialism and twisted class resentment rose the ruling Hutu Power movement, which managed to convince tens of thousands of Hutus to kill their neighbors, co-workers and even friends. This many of them did systematically, and largely by machete, day after day, pursuing the utter extinction of the Tutsis as if it were a 9-to-5 job, while Western nations stood by. Gourevitch struggles to make sense of the economic, political and ideological roots of the slaughter, but, while he makes a convincing case that it could have been averted, in the end we're left with the sense of an unknowable core of idiotic monstrosity -- and the uneasy intimation that its potential lurks in every human being. "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families":
SALON | Dec. 21, 1998 (The Salon Book Awards are chosen from trade titles published in the United States and in English.)
G O+T O+| Introduction | Fiction Awards
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
Arts & Entertainment | Books | Comics | Life | News | People
Politics | Sex | Tech & Business | Audio
The Free Software Project | The Movie Page
Letters | Columnists | Salon Plus
Copyright © 2000 Salon.com All rights reserved.
