CANR
WORK TITLE: The Perfectionists
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/28/1944
WEBSITE: http://www.simonwinchester.com/
CITY:
STATE: MA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 315
Lives in New York and the Berkshires.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 28, 1944, in London, England; became naturalized American citizen, July 4, 2011; son of Bernard and Andrée Winchester; married first wife, Judy, 1966 (divorced); married second wife, 1989 (divorced, 1997); married Setsuko Sato; children: (first marriage) three sons; (out of wedlock) one daughter.
EDUCATION:St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, M.A., 1966.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and journalist. Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, reporter, 1967-70; Guardian, London, England, correspondent in Northern Ireland, 1970-72, in Washington, DC, 1972-76, and in New Delhi, India, 1977-79; Daily Mail, London, chief U.S. correspondent in Washington, DC, 1979-80, American bureau chief, 1980; Sunday Times, London, senior feature writer, 1981-85. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, first writer-in-residence, 2001; San Jose State University, CA, Lurie Professor, 2004. Previously, worked for a Canadian mining company in Uganda.
AVOCATIONS:Letterpress printing, model railways, cider making, beekeeping, astronomy, and stamp collecting.
AWARDS:Journalist of the Year, England; AAPG Journalism Award; Order of the British Empire, 2006; honorary fellow, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, 2009; honorary degree, Dalhousie University, 2010.
RELIGION: Church of England.WRITINGS
Author of introduction to the 2002 edition of A Dictionary of Modern Usage, by Henry Fowler, Oxford University Press (New York, NY); author of afterword of Oxford, by Martin Parr, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2017. Contributing editor, Harper’s. Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Smithsonian, Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic, and Salon.
SIDELIGHTS
Simon Winchester is a journalist and writer as well as a trained geologist. Born in London and educated at Oxford University, Winchester worked on oil rigs in the North Sea before turning his hand to journalism, writing as a correspondent for British newspapers around the world and covering stories from the Watergate affair to the Falklands War. In 1987 he became a full-time freelance writer, exploring topics from the urbane to the catastrophic. His surprise best seller The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary tells an intriguing behind-the-scenes story of the writing of the Oxford English Dictionary, while his 2003 work Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883 looks at a volcanic eruption that affected the entire world in the late nineteenth century. Other books from Winchester have examined topics from England’s imperial past to the history of China. A thorough researcher, Winchester confessed to “research rapture” in an interview with Adair Lara in the San Francisco Chronicle Online. “I’m in total rapture when I’m doing research,” Winchester noted. “The temptation to get diverted into fascinating byways is enormous. You’ve got to keep these things measured and keep your eye on the real purpose of writing the book.”
“I doubt that anybody has researched the British hereditary peerage as thoroughly or as entertainingly as Winchester,” wrote Gerry Graber in a Los Angeles Times review of Winchester’s 1981 book Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain. In this book, the author explores the power and prestige of British peerage by way of fact and anecdote. Winchester’s basic contention is that Britain, by clinging to the legislative rights of heredity, limits its chances to adapt to the dynamic, modern world. Unlike Japan, which abandoned its system of peerage after World War II, Britain maintained its institution in which lawmakers are selected by birth right. But if Britain is to “retain respect of the thrusting, grasping assertive countries of the globe that now surround her,” the country must, noted Winchester in Their Noble Lordships, “develop a machinery of government that is in tune with the demands of the century.”
Mid-Career Nonfiction
Nine books and sixteen years later, Winchester told a strange but true story in The Professor and the Madman. The professor behind the title is J.A.H. Murray, the determined editor who was behind the publication of the massive Oxford English Dictionary. Volunteers helped to create the dictionary by submitting definitions and illustrative quotations. One of the most prolific contributors was a Dr. W.C. Minor, who supplied more than 10,000 entries. After seventeen years of corresponding with Minor, Murray decided to visit his star worker. He was shocked to discover that Minor was confined to Broadmoor Asylum, a British prison for the criminally insane.
Minor had been born in Ceylon to American missionary parents. He acted as a surgeon in the Civil War. Perhaps as a result of the horrors he saw during that conflict, Minor became paranoid and schizophrenic. He left America for Europe, looking for a rest cure. Probably under the influence of his delusions, he shot and killed an innocent man, believing him to be an assassin. Once confined to Broadmoor, Minor was treated well; he had two cells and was allowed to keep his precious library in one of them. He was lucid most of the time, yet at night he was still plagued by hallucinations and terrible self-loathing, which eventually drove him to mutilate himself. A Library Journal reviewer rated The Professor and the Madman a “delightful, simply written book” that “tells how a murderer made a huge contribution to what became a major reference source in the Western world.” A Publishers Weekly writer noted: “Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task.”
Reviewing the British edition of the book, which was published as The Surgeon of Crowthorne, an Economist reviewer called it “an extraordinary tale, and Simon Winchester could not have told it better. His fast pace means that the lexicographical details are never dull. He has an engaging sympathy with his main characters, and even the minor ones are painted with swift, vivid strokes. … Mr. Winchester has written a splendid book.”
Winchester celebrates another solitary and underreported achievement in The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology. In this book, Winchester presents the story of Smith, a mere surveyor and engineer, who created in 1815 the “world’s first proper geological map,” according to Kathryn Hughes in the New Statesman. Smith labored for years on his own to create a graphic representation of the world that showed geological strata, a finding that called into question the Genesis theory of creation. Robert Macfarlane, writing in the Spectator, found the book a “charming biography,” while Hughes commented that Winchester “has written a wonderful book.” Hughes also felt that Winchester was “particularly impressive” in the manner in which he “recreates the world picture of society tottering on the edge of an epistemological abyss.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Malcolm C. McKenna had similar praise: “Winchester brings Smith’s struggle to light in clear and beautiful language.”
Geology on a grander scale comes into focus in Winchester’s Krakatoa, a recounting of one of the most violent volcanic eruptions in the nineteenth century. The entire island was vaporized when its volcano exploded in 1883, sending shock waves around the world, killing thousands of people, and providing brilliant sunsets around the world. So large was the explosion that it was heard 3,000 miles away; the tsunamis it generated killed people 2,000 miles from the blast. Winchester provides the background to the explosion in this “lavish rijstafel of a book,” as a reviewer in the Economist described Krakatoa. The critic further noted that Winchester has written an “engagingly discursive … account of the events leading up to the cataclysm.” Lev Grossman, reviewing the title in Time, observed that Winchester “takes an event that happened in a white-hot second and expands it in both directions, filling in the backstory and aftershocks to create a mesmerizing page turner.” Grossman called Winchester an “extraordinarily graceful writer.” Spectator contributor Justin Marozzi also had praise for the book, remarking that “we learn a great deal in the course of this book and Winchester, storyteller to the core, wears his erudition lightly.” And writing in the New York Times Book Review, Richard Ellis was full of superlatives: “[Krakatoa] is thrilling, comprehensive, literate, meticulously researched and scientifically accurate; it is one of the best books ever written about the history and significance of a natural disaster.”
Later Nonfiction
Winchester returns to the world of his breakout best seller, The Professor and the Madman, with his 2003 title The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. While the former book focuses on two main players in the etymological endeavor, the latter book tells “the eventful, personality-filled history of the definitive English dictionary,” a critic in Publishers Weekly observed. Commissioned in 1857, the dictionary took seven decades and huge cost overruns to complete. Among the cast of characters in its completion are Murray and Minor from the earlier work, but also readers and researchers such as J.R.R. Tolkien. In the end, the dictionary was completed at over 15,000 single-spaced pages with over 400,000 words and almost 200,000 illustrative quotations. Winchester’s book will be, according to the Publishers Weekly, reviewer, “required reading for word mavens.” A contributor in Kirkus Reviews likewise found the book a “magnificent account, swift and compelling, of obsessions, scholarship, and, ultimately, philanthropy of the first magnitude.” A Christian Century critic called the book a “fascinating account,” while Robert McCrum, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, found it “an affectionate and frankly partisan study of the making of a great dictionary.” And for William F. Buckley, Jr., writing in the New York Times Book Review, the book “is teeming with knowledge and alive with insights.”
In A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, Winchester takes his approach to the eruption of Krakatoa and applies it to the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. Over the course of the book, he provides readers with a thorough look at the earthquake itself, examining all of the scientific factors that led to the event as well as what technically occurred below the surface of the ground to cause such havoc aboveground. Once again, Winchester applies layman’s terms to the geological details of the situation to make it comprehensible for average readers. Beyond that, he explains the effect the earthquake had on the city and its citizens, discussing the historical, social, and political ramifications of the destruction of San Francisco and the subsequent fear of the potential continued danger. The destruction of Chinatown, in particular, had major consequences, as many immigration records were also destroyed at that point, after which it became nearly impossible for anyone from China to gain access to the United States. Future construction in the city as a whole was greatly improved in the aftermath of the quake as new regulations went into effect regarding how a building might withstand both future earthquakes and fires. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked of the book that “Winchester is an engaging tour guide, and his tale a humbling one.” Joel Turnipseed, writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, declared that Winchester “excels at unfolding a complicated scientific story as part of a narrative, one that slowly accretes a mountain of facts and details—all pushed and crammed and bulged up against one another in patterns of fascination, like so much of the terrain he explores.”
The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom is a biography of Joseph Needham, a Cambridge professor whose life spanned nearly the entire twentieth century and whose seminal work, Science and Civilization in China, helped to define the Western world’s perceptions of China, its history, and its people, to an extent never before possible. Much of Needham’s book stressed the high level of technology and advances in China, which far surpassed similar knowledge and innovation in the West for many centuries. Winchester’s take on Needham’s journey and his experiences comes at an intriguing time in modern history, as China is once again excelling in various scientific arenas and shows the potential to surpass the West in its technological advances and breakthroughs. Needham’s interest in China was first sparked by a Chinese graduate student with whom he had an affair in the mid-1930s. Over the course of their encounter, he developed a desire to learn the Chinese language, an ambition and an undertaking that snowballed as he became more and more interested in the country’s culture and history. He determined to chronicle what he learned and undertook the journey to China, traveling along the famed silk road in order to achieve his aims. His book ended up as a multivolume investigation of the various facets of Chinese life and culture, addressing such varied topics as politics, zoology, astronomy, and many others from the Chinese point of view. Seth Faison, writing in the Los Angeles Times Online, praised Winchester’s biography of Needham for the most part, stating that “Winchester is an engaging writer and brisk storyteller. His one failing in this book is to skate too quickly over what came to be known as the ‘Needham question’: Why did China, so technologically advanced in antiquity, essentially get stuck after AD 500? In the following centuries, as modern science thrived in the West, why was China left behind?” Gilbert Taylor, writing in Booklist, declared that “the capacious life of an academic comes alive in Winchester’s skilled, insightful portrait.” According to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “Winchester plunges the reader into the action with hardly a break.”
Winchester followed The Man Who Loved China with Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories and The Alice behind Wonderland. In the latter, Winchester explores the photography of Charles Dodgson, the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland as Lewis Carroll. In particular, Winchester focuses on an infamous photo of Alice Liddell, the young girl who served as the model for Dodgson’s protagonist. In the image, six-year-old Alice is dressed as a beggar; her rags leave a shoulder and nipple exposed. This image has caused over a century of speculation regarding Dodgson’s alleged pedophilia, but Winchester dispels these notions, explaining the differences between cultural norms at the time and those today. Winchester also notes that the photograph was taken when the photography was in its infancy, and he explores the technical acuity and perfection required to capture the image.
The Alice behind Wonderland received mixed reviews, with some critics calling it flawed, brief, and oddly focused. Others, however, called it illuminating and unique. London Guardian contributor Stephen Bates felt that “acres of print have been expended on Carroll’s surrealism and Dodgson’s sexuality, and here now is a very brief monograph by the prolific Simon Winchester. It is scarcely more than a clearing of the throat or an extended article between his big books on earthquakes and the Atlantic, focusing forensically on one photograph and one relationship: that with Alice Pleasance Liddell, the original Alice.” As Toronto Globe and Mail writer Mark Kingwell noted: “Small flaws flank the large ones. Winchester’s eye for detail and flowing prose are here in their usual proportion. But despite its brief length, there are repetitions. And, strangely for a book about photography and investigating a photograph, there are no images.” Despite this, Kingwell called Winchester “a veteran spelunker in the caverns of eccentricity.” He also stated that the author “does his best in this slim volume to enhance the drama of this historic conjunction.” Acknowledging the book’s flaws in the London Independent, Jonathan Sale admitted: “Winchester saves the day by using the evocative photo as a way into the development of photography and the part it played in the creation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Library Journal, Nancy R. Ives declared of The Alice behind Wonderland: “An important addition to the burgeoning collection of Dodgson scholarship, this book will appeal to scholars and general readers.” Booklist reviewer Michael Cart announced that “even its more technical aspects are made interesting and accessible by Winchester’s always elegant writing.”
The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible is a bird’s-eye-view history of the development of the United States into a single unified nation. The author divides the narrative into sections named for the five classical elements: wood, earth, water, fire, and metal. Thus, the story begins with the Eastern Woodlands and the trek across the continent taken by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase. The narration turns to earth as it chronicles the work of Thomas Hutchins, whose survey system, developed in 1785, became the template used to lay out the immense American West; later, in 1809, William Maclure, a geologist, created a geologic map of the Appalachian Mountains. The section of the book headed “Water” examines the steps forward in transportation and economic development with the creation of the nation’s canal system, such as the Erie Canal, and the interstate highway system, which was born in 1812 in Cumberland, Maryland. “Fire” takes up Robert Fulton’s steam engine and its beneficial effects for the nation’s rail system. Finally, “Metal,” in the form of telegraph wires and later, electrical cables, boosted the speed of communication and added comfort to American homes. Between these historical developments, Winchester, a recent U.S. citizen, provides accounts of his own widespread travels in the United States.
Reviewers generally had high praise for The Men Who United the States. One exception is John Preston, who, in a review in Spectator, skewered the book for “windiness,” commenting: “But however strange or stirring these stories, it doesn’t do them any favours to relate them in a prose style that reads like God let loose on a thesaurus.” In support of his opinion that the book’s prose is overwrought, Preston cites sentences that he found “grandiloquent” and “nonsensical.” Other reviewers did not share this view. Nathan Bender, in a review in Library Journal, observed that “Winchester provides surprising insights into our social history, further enriching his narrative with accounts of his personal odysseys around the country.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer felt that Winchester’s book “masterfully evokes the excitement of the nation’s early days.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor was of the opinion that “Winchester can tell a good yarn with evident relish.” The reviewer went on to praise the book for its “stories of American ingenuity, which Winchester recounts with enormous gusto and verve,” and concluded by calling The Men Who United the States “another winning book.” Finally, Booklist‘s Jay Freeman called the book a “valuable reminder that the evolution of our united nation was a process often accelerated by … men who operated outside the political sphere.”
Winchester’s next outing, Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers is in essence a biography of the Pacific Ocean, its islands, and the Pacific Rim—and a companion volume of sorts to his Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. In the author’s view, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea hold the keys to understanding the past, but the Pacific will likely impact the lives of everyone in the future. Winchester organizes the book by focusing on ten key political, environmental, cultural, recreational, and scientific events or developments in the ocean’s history since 1950, devoting a chapter to each. The book opens with discussion of aboveground nuclear testing during the early 1950s, with its attendant baneful effects, including the displacement and resettlement of islanders and the deaths of those who did not survive the lethal doses of radiation they received. The author then turns to the rise of Japan and the development of the transistor radio by the fledgling Sony Corporation. Also included are chapters on surfing in Hawaii and California; on environmental changes and global warming; North Korea’s 1968 seizure of the USS Pueblo, a U.S. Navy intelligence-gathering vessel, and its eighty-two crew members; the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines and its surprising effects on the U.S. military; and the rise of a resurgent and bellicose China, which has been flexing its military muscles in the Pacific. As is usually the case, Winchester provides the reader with numerous nuggets of information that are interesting in themselves, such as the fact that immense hydrothermal vents recycle the Pacific’s water every ten years, or that an obscure American colonel armed with a grease pencil drew on a map the line that divided the Korean Peninsula at the 38th parallel, or that the multi-island nation of Kiribati, encompassing more than a million square miles, is the only nation on earth to straddle all four hemispheres—north, south, east, and west.
Reviewers generally admired Pacific, although Nina MacLaughlin of the Boston Globe commented about the book’s structure that “the overall feel is something akin to a hastily assembled boat, fun enough at first, but ultimately unseaworthy and ready to sink.” Nevertheless, MacLaughlin further commented that the author “excels at guiding the reader with a contagious sense of wonder.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor, characterizing the book as “a series of high-resolution literary snapshots of the Pacific Ocean,” concluded that “Winchester’s passionate research—on sea and land—undergirds this superb analysis of a world wonder that we seem hellbent on damaging.” Philip Hoare, in a review in the London Guardian, found the book “full of wondrous anecdotes,” concluding: “The Pacific is our future ocean. And in this provocative, elegant book, it has found a new and lucid storyteller.” Finally, in a review in the New York Times Book Review, Jennifer Senior remarked: “Mr. Winchester’s books live and die by their idiosyncrasies, anecdotes and writerly grace, not their overall structure or intellectual arguments, of which there are few. The book’s 10 chapters are ultimately an excuse for him to freestyle about the characters and episodes that beguile him most.”
When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis is a book by Winchester that is geared toward younger readers. The book begins with a personal story involving seismic activity. Winchester goes on to include photographs, diagrams, and descriptions of the phenomena listed in the book’s subtitle. A writer in Children’s Bookwatch called the book “a vivid and revealing read.” Amy Thurow, reviewer in School Library Journal, asserted: “This title works both as a basic overview of earth science and as a fine example of how to incorporate personal narrative into nonfiction.”
A follow-up to When the Earth Shakes, the 2017 volume, When the Sky Breaks: Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and the Worst Weather in the World, finds Winchester again writing for a younger audience. In this book, he explains how storms build, tells how meteorologists measure them, and includes photos depicting them. A contributor to Children’s Bookwatch described When the Sky Breaks as “a vivid and compelling read.”
In The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, Winchester highlights the important developments of unsung engineers from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. Among them are the inventor of the hydraulic press, Joseph Bramah, the creator of precision machine tools, Joseph Whitworth, and the inventor of the refracting telescope, Jesse Ramsden. Winchester also profiles John Wilkinson, who implemented discoveries by James Watt, which greatly changed the performance of steam engines. According to Winchester, Whitworth’s precision tools were instrumental in helping to streamline the production of automobiles and making them affordable for the masses. More contemporary developments that Winchester mentions include the creation and refinement of the jet engine. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Winchester’s latest is a rollicking work of pop science that entertains and informs.” Carl Hays, critic in Booklist, described The Perfectionists as “another gem from one of the world’s justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people.” A Kirkus Reviews writer called it “less a work of scholarship than an enthusiastic popular-science tour of technological marvels, and readers will love the ride.” Steve Donoghue, contributor to the Christian Science Monitor, suggested: “The story Winchester tells is one of steady, almost inexorably increasing complexity, and this can make the book’s later sections heavier going for the lay reader.” However, Donoghue continued: “It’s a testament to Winchester’s narrative skill, honed over two dozen books, that he makes even the most arcane of technical specifics smoothly comprehensible in context—no mean feat when he’s dealing with something like extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV).”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Winchester, Simon, Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain, Random House (New York, NY), 1982.
PERIODICALS
Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly, November 30, 1992, David Oyama, review of Pacific Nightmare: How Japan Starts World War III: A Future History, p. 13.
Booklist, November 1, 1996, Alice Joyce, review of The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze and Back in Chinese Time, p. 477; August, 1998, Brad Hooper, review of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 1941; September 1, 2003, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 4; March 15, 2008, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom, p. 4; September 1, 2010, Brad Hooper, review of Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, p. 23; February 1, 2011, Michael Cart, review of The Alice behind Wonderland, p. 16; September 1, 2013, Jay Freeman, review of The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible, p. 29; March 1, 2018, Carl Hays, review of The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, p. 11.
Business Week, September 3, 2001, review of The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology, p. 18.
Children’s Bookwatch, September, 2015, review of When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis; February, 2017, review of When the Sky Breaks: Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and the Worst Weather in the World.
Christian Century, October 4, 2003, review of The Meaning of Everything, p. 6.
Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 2018, Steve Donoghue, review of The Perfectionists.
Economist, May 16, 1992, review of Pacific Nightmare, p. 119; March 29, 2003, review of Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 27, 1883.
Far Eastern Economic Review, October 8, 1992, review of Pacific Nightmare, p. 50.
Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), March 23, 2011, Mark Kingwell, review of The Alice behind Wonderland.
Guardian (London, England), April 16, 2011, Stephen Bates, review of The Alice behind Wonderland.
Independent (London, England), April 27, 2011, Jonathan Sale, review of The Alice behind Wonderland.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 2003, review of The Meaning of Everything, p. 1010; August 1, 2005, review of A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906, p. 841; August 1, 2013, review of The Men Who United the States; August 1, 2015, review of Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers; March 1, 2018, review of The Perfectionists.
Library Journal, May 1, 1986, Harold M. Otness, review of The Sun Never Sets: Travels to the Remaining Outposts of the British Empire, p. 121; April 15, 1991, review of Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture, p. 110; September 1, 1992, Elsa Pendleton, review of Pacific Nightmare, p. 218; October 15, 1996, Caroline A. Mitchell, review of The River at the Center of the World, p. 81; March 15, 1999, Danna Bell-Russell, review of The Professor and the Madman, p. 126; September 1, 2003, I. Pour-El, review of Krakatoa, pp. 229-230; September 1, 2010, Kathleen McCallister, review of Atlantic, p. 122; January 1, 2011, Nancy R. Ives, review of The Alice behind Wonderland, p. 98; September 15, 2013, Nathan Bender, review of The Men Who United the States, p. 85.
Los Angeles Times, July 2, 1982, Gary Graber, review of Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain.
Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 11, 2003, Kenneth Reich, review of Krakatoa, p. 10; October 19, 2003, Robert McCrum, review of The Meaning of Everything, p. 6.
M2 Best Books, October 22, 2003, Darren Ingram, review of The Meaning of Everything.
Maclean’s, December 13, 2010, Colby Cosh, review of Atlantic, p. 47; November 9, 2015, review of Pacific, p. 125.
National Review, December 21, 1998, Linda Bridges, review of The Professor and the Madman, p. 64.
New Statesman, July 2, 2001, Kathryn Hughes, review of The Map That Changed the World, p. 54.
New York Review of Books, September 24, 1998, John Gross, review of The Professor and the Madman, p. 13.
New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1986, Andrew Harvey, review of The Sun Never Sets, p. 14; April 28, 1991, review of Pacific Rising, p. 10; October 18, 1992, Malcolm Bosse, review of Pacific Nightmare, p. 11; December 8, 1996, David Willis McCullough, review of The River at the Center of the World, p. 31; August 30, 1998, David Walton, review of The Professor and the Madman, p. 12; August 5, 2001, Malcolm C. McKenna, review of The Map That Changed the World, p. 14; April 20, 2003, Richard Ellis, review of Krakatoa, p. 9; October 12, 2003, William F. Buckley, Jr., review of The Meaning of Everything, p. 13.
Publishers Weekly, March 14, 1986, review of The Sun Never Sets, p. 93; February 22, 1991, review of Pacific Rising, p. 206; July 27, 1992, review of Pacific Nightmare, p. 47; September 16, 1996, review of The River at the Center of the World, p. 59; November 2, 1998, review of The Professor and the Madman, p. 35; September 27, 1999, review of The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans, p. 80; August 27, 2001, Yvonne Nolan, “Tracking the Mapmaker,” pp. 44-45; March 10, 2003, Matt Nelson, “An Explosion of Attention,” p. 64; July 14, 2003, review of The Meaning of Everything, p. 66; March 10, 2008, review of The Man Who Loved China, p. 68; July 15, 2013, review of The Men Who United the States, p. 155; March 19, 2018, review of The Perfectionists, p. 65.
School Library Journal, March, 1999, Susan H. Woodcock, review of The Professor and the Madman, p. 233; November, 2015, Amy Thurow, review of When the Earth Shakes, p. 138.
Science, August 24, 2001, David Oldroyd, review of The Map That Changed the World, p. 1439.
Smithsonian, April, 1987, David Lancashire, review of The Sun Never Sets, p. 156.
Spectator, July 7, 2001, Robert Macfarlane, review of The Map That Changed the World, p. 32; June 7, 2003, Justin Marozzi, review of Krakatoa, pp. 44-45; December 14, 2013, John Preston, “As Grand as the Grand Canyon Itself,” review of The Men Who United the States, p. 91.
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 16, 2005, “Nonfiction; Crash & Burn; Two Books on the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Expose Our Geographic Vulnerabilities and Our Sometimes Less-than-admirable Response to Disaster,” p. 15.
Time, September 14, 1998, Jesse Birnbaum, review of The Professor and the Madman, p. 76; May 12, 2003, Lev Grossman, review of Krakatoa, p. 79.
Washington Post, May 22, 2003, George F. Will, review of Krakatoa, p. A35.
Wilson Library Bulletin, June, 1986, Sam Staggs, review of The Sun Never Sets, p. 87.
ONLINE
Boston Globe, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ (October 24, 2015), Nina MacLaughlin, review of Pacific.
Brooklyn Book Festival website, https://www.brooklynbookfestival.org/ (November 12, 2018), author profile.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 1, 2015), Philip Hoare, review of Pacific.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (May 25, 2008), Seth Faison, review of The Man Who Loved China.
New York Times Book Review, http://www.nytimes.com/ (November 1, 2015), Jennifer Senior, review of Pacific.
San Francisco Chronicle Online, http://www.sfgate.com/ (April 6, 2003), Adair Lara, “Q&A: Simon Winchester: Enraptured by Research, Intrigued by All.”
Simon Winchester website, http://www.simonwinchester.com (November 12, 2018).
Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford and has written for Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian, and National Geographic. Simon Winchester's many books include The Professor and the Madman ; The Map that Changed the World ; Krakatoa; and A Crack in the Edge of the World. Each of these have both been New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. Mr. Winchester was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by HM The Queen in 2006. He lives in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland.
Simon Winchester
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Simon Winchester
Winchester in New York City, 2013
Born
28 September 1944 (age 74)
London, England
Education
University of Oxford, Geology, 1966
Occupation
Journalist, author
Employer
The Guardian
Spouse(s)
Setsuko Sato
Website
simonwinchester.com
Simon Winchester, OBE (born 28 September 1944) is a British-American author and journalist. In his career at The Guardian newspaper, Winchester covered numerous significant events, including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. Winchester has written or contributed to more than a dozen nonfiction books, has written one novel, and has contributed to several travel magazines, among them Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic. He lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
Contents
1
Early life and education
2
Career
3
Personal life
4
Bibliography
5
Honours
6
See also
7
References
8
External links
Early life and education[edit]
Born in London, Winchester attended several boarding schools in Dorset.[1] He spent a year hitchhiking around the United States,[2] then in 1963 went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford to study geology. He graduated in 1966, and found work with Falconbridge of Africa, a Canadian mining company. His first assignment was to work as a field geologist searching for copper deposits in Uganda.[3]
Career[edit]
While on assignment in Uganda, Winchester happened upon a copy of James Morris's Coronation Everest, an account of the 1953 expedition that led to the first successful ascent of Mount Everest.[4] The book instilled in Winchester the desire to be a writer, so he wrote to Morris, seeking career advice. Morris urged Winchester to give up geology the very day he received the letter, and get a job as a writer on a newspaper.[5]
In 1969 Winchester joined The Guardian, first as a regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but later as its Northern Ireland correspondent.[1] Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast "Hour of Terror".[6][7] In 1971, Winchester became involved in a controversy over the British press' coverage of Northern Ireland when he was denounced on the floor of the House of Commons by Bernadette Devlin for his part in justifying the shooting to death of Berney Watt by British soldiers.[8]
After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming correspondent for The Guardian in Washington, DC, where he covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration[9] to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency.[3]
In 1982, while working as chief foreign feature writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held for three months as a prisoner in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego.[10] He wrote about this event in his book, Prison Diary, published in 1983 and also in Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire, published in 1985. That same year, he shifted to working as a freelance writer and travelled to Hong Kong.[1] When Condé Nast re-branded Signature magazine as Condé Nast Traveler, Winchester was appointed its Asia-Pacific Editor.[11] Over the following fifteen years he contributed to a number of travel publications including Traveler, National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine.[10]
Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his experiences of the turmoil in Northern Ireland. In 1976 he published his second book, American Heartbeat, which deals with his travels through the American heartland. Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998) published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller.[12]
Though he still writes travel books, Winchester has used the narrative non-fiction form he adopted for The Professor and the Madman several more times, resulting in multiple best-selling books. The Map that Changed the World (2001) focuses on the geologist William Smith and was Winchester's second New York Times best seller.[13] The year 2003 saw the publication of The Meaning of Everything, which returns to the topic of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, and of the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.[14] Winchester then published A Crack in the Edge of the World, a book about San Francisco's 1906 earthquake.[15] The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of the scholar Joseph Needham.[16]The Alice Behind Wonderland, an exploration of the life and work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), and his relationship with Alice Liddell, was published in 2011.[17]
On 4 July 2011 Winchester was naturalized as an American citizen in a ceremony aboard the USS Constitution.[2] Winchester's book on the Pacific Ocean, Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers, was published in 2015. It was his second book about the Pacific region, his first, Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture having been published in 1991.
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Personal life[edit]
Winchester lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.[18]
Bibliography[edit]
1975 – In Holy Terror
1976 – American Heartbeat
1983 – Stones of Empire: Buildings of the Raj (by Jan Morris; photographs by Simon Winchester)
1983 – Prison Diary: Argentina
1984 – Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain
1985 – Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire (also published under the title The Sun Never Sets)
1988 – Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles
1991 – Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture
1992 – Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons (by Rich Browne, James Marshall and Simon Winchester)
1992 – Pacific Nightmare: How Japan Starts World War III : A Future History (a novel)
1995 – Small World: A Global Photographic Project, 1987–94 (by Martin Parr and Simon Winchester), Dewi Lewis, ISBN 1-899235-05-1
1996 – The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time
1998 – The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Published in the United States as The Professor and the Madman) – Dr. William Chester Minor and Sir James Murray
1999 – The Fracture Zone: A Return to the Balkans
2001 – The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (the geologist William Smith)
2003 – The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (the making of the Oxford English Dictionary)
2003 – Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (on the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa)
2004 – Simon Winchester's Calcutta (a collection of writings about the Indian city, edited with his son Rupert Winchester)
2005 – A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 (on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake)
2008 – The Man Who Loved China – the life of Joseph Needham (title of the UK edition: Bomb, Book & Compass)
2010 – Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. HarperCollins, 2010. ISBN 978-0-00-734137-5 (also published under the title Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean)
2011 – The Alice Behind Wonderland (on Alice Liddell)
2013 – The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
2015 – When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis
2015 – Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers
2018 – The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Honours[edit]
Winchester was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for "services to journalism and literature" in Queen Elizabeth II's New Year Honours list of 2006.
Winchester was named an honorary fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford in October 2009.[19]
Winchester received an honorary degree from Dalhousie University in October 2010.[20]
Winchester received the Lawrence J. Burpee Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society in November 2016. He was also elected a Fellow of the RCGS.
Simon Winchester, OBE, a British writer, journalist and broadcaster, was born in north London on 28th September 1944, the only child of Bernard and Andrée Winchester (née deWael).
Though not Catholic, he was educated first at a boarding convent in Bridport, Dorset and later at Hardye’s School, Dorchester, Dorset – where he achieved the dubious dual distinction of being appointed Head of House and of soon thereafter being expelled for conducting a spectacularly destructive chemical experiment in the newly-opened science laboratories. After taking time off to hitch-hike around Canada and the United States for almost a year between leaving school and entering university, he went up to Oxford in 1963, to read geology at St. Catherine’s College. There he became involved in the University Exploration Club, and was the member of a six-man sledding expedition onto an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice-cap in 1965.
After graduation in 1966 he joined a Canadian mining company, Falconbridge of Africa, and worked as field geologist in Uganda, looking for copper deposits in the foothills of the Ruwenzori Mountains, close to the border with Congo.
He then made a sudden and unexpected switch to journalism in 1967, a short while after reading, while in a jungle camp in Uganda, a copy of Coronation Everest by James (now Jan) Morris. This account by the then correspondent of the London Times – which published the first exclusive report of the success of the Everest expedition, on 2ndJune 1953, by happy coincidence the day of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II – triggered in Winchester what he later described as a ‘Pauline conversion’ – and though he was to refer to geology in many of his subsequent writings, he turned some days after reading the book to a new career in newspaper reporting, and was to remain a full-time writer for the rest of his working life.
After being employed on an offshore oil rig in the North Sea for some months, all the while applying for work on a variety of newspapers which, not unreasonably, displayed little interest in hiring so inexperienced a candidate, Winchester was eventually offered the chance to work as a junior reporter on The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne. After a year as a general assignment reporter there he opted to concentrate on science reporting, and soon achieved some success in carving a niche for himself on both the news and feature pages of this well-regarded morning newspaper.
In 1969 he joined The Guardian, first as the Newcastle upon Tyne-based regional correspondent and later as Northern Ireland Correspondent, based in Belfast. He remained in Ireland for the next three years – during which time he was named Britain’s Journalist of the Year, in 1971 – and covered all of the major developments in the territory, from the British government’s introduction of internment without trial of IRA suspects, through the events of Bloody Sunday in Londonderry in January 1972, to the British army crackdown during Operation Motorman. During this period he became a frequent commentator on and contributor to BBC radio.
He was also briefly detached from Ireland to Calcutta, to undertake his first foreign assignment for the newspaper, covering the war that led to the independence from Pakistan of the new Bengali homeland of Bangladesh.
In 1972 he was posted to Washington, DC, as America correspondent, and spent much of the following four years covering the Watergate affair, the resignation of President Nixon and the election to the White House of Jimmy Carter. It was also during this period that, on the urging of the noted Faber editor Charles Monteith (who edited the poet Philip Larkin and discovered William Golding’s Lord of the Flies) Winchester wrote his first book, In Holy Terror, an account of his reporting years in Ireland.
Following Washington he was posted in 1977 to New Delhi as India Correspondent,– driving the family Volvo to India from Oxford, in the days when it was entirely possible and congenial to drive through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and there covered events across the region that included the period of Emergency Rule of Indira Gandhi, the Soviet-backed coup d’etat in Afghanistan, and the various assassinations and small wars that characterized the subcontinent for the next three years.
In 1980 Winchester was very briefly appointed American Bureau Chief for the Daily Mail, a London tabloid newspaper that at the time was still smarting with embarrassment for having employed in its New York office a reporter named James Gibbins who, undetected for several months, had simply made everything up. His inventiveness was ultimately discovered by a rival journalist and he was sacked - with Winchester, most unsuitably, being offered and accepting a considerable sum to replace him and to provide, it was hoped, some new image of gravitas to the paper. It turned out to be an unhappy choice for all concerned, and by 1981 Winchester had left the paper, and was back in London, working as Chief Foreign Feature Writer for the Sunday Times.
He achieved some early and unintended notoriety in this post during the spring of 1982 when he managed both to be on the Falkland Islands when they were invaded by Argentine forces, and shortly afterwards to be captured in southern Patagonia, along with two other journalist working for the rival newspaper, the Observer, and held in prison in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, for the following three months.
After his return to freedom in England in July 1982 Winchester continued to travel and write for the newspaper, but when a new editor was appointed in 1985 he changed his arrangements to that of freelance correspondent, and travelled – by train, from London by way of Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bator – to take up a new assignment in Hong Kong.
He was to remain based in southern China, responsible for covering a vast territory stretching from Siberia to Tasmania, from Burma to Hawaii – for the next twelve years, during which time he rejoined the Guardian and also accepted a freelance assignment as Asia Editor of the newly-established Conde Nast Traveler magazine, based in New York. His term with the Guardianthen came to an abrupt end when his supervising editor was found to have been taking gifts from the KGB, and was fired. Winchester remained in Hong Kong making as good a living as possible as a freelance writer, and then after the handover of the British colony to China in June 1997, went to live in New York.
It was here that his recent good fortune as an author began, with the publication in 1998 ofThe Professor and the Madman, a book about a forgotten American player in the extraordinary story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Although his publishers had little initial hope for the book – ordering an initial very modest print run of some 10,000 copies – it happened that thanks to a convergence of happy circumstances the book went on to sell millions of copies, and remains in print today in both hardback and paperback twelve years after publication.
The entirely unexpected success of The Professor and the similarly unanticipated stellar performance of many of the non-fiction titles that Winchester wrote during the following decade finally allowed him to withdraw from regular journalism and concentrate on working more or less entirely as an author.
He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) ‘for services to journalism and literature’ in the New Year Honours list for 2006. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, in October 2009.
Simon Winchester, who is married to the former NPR producer Setsuko Sato, lives in New York and on a small farm in the Berkshires. His interests include letterpress printing, bee-keeping, astronomy, stamp-collecting, model railways and cider-making.
The New York Times Sunday Book Review
Simon Winchester: By the Book
December 10, 2015
The author, most recently, of “Pacific”says there’s at least one kind of narrative he avoids: “Sensible people tell me I should like stories with zombies, but try as I might, I don’t.”
What books are currently on your night stand?
A bit of dog’s breakfast, I’m afraid. Top of the pile is Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies,” as I like to go to sleep in good humor. Then there is Witold Rybczynski’s “One Good Turn,” the history of the screwdriver; and a classic Folio edition of Samuel Smiles’s “Lives of the Engineers.” I am on a Stefan Zweig bender just now, so I have “The Post-Office Girl” to hand. And Josephine Tey, “The Singing Sands”: I’m teasing this last one out, so I’m still not sure what happened to the dead man on the train.
And what’s the best book you’ve read so far this year?
No contest, even though it hasn’t made much of an impact here yet, and maybe never will: “Farthest Field,” by Raghu Karnad. It is an exquisitely written memoir of the wartime lives of the young Indian journalist’s grandfather and two great-uncles, and is so heart-stoppingly beautiful I want all around to read it too.
Which writers — novelists, essayists, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
Billy Collins; Paul Muldoon; Ian Buruma; William Boyd; Simon Schama; Paul Theroux; Pico Iyer; Salman Rushdie.
What genres do you especially enjoy reading?
I’m unashamedly drawn to tales of the remote, the lonely and the hard — like Willa Cather on Nebraska or Ivan Doig on Montana. The Icelandic Nobelist Halldor Laxness, with his “Independent People,” still is, for me, the supreme example. But I also like railway murder stories and timetable mysteries, especially those involving Inspector French and his Dublin-born creator, Freeman Wills Crofts.
And which do you avoid?
Frankly, anything that has the name Derrida in it.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to?
I enjoy the bizarre and the fantastic — Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual,” or Borges and his “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” which I still think one of the cleverest things I’ve read. I also want to revive the reputation of the detective writer John Franklin Bardin, whose books are so richly insane that you feel your own sanity slipping away as you read, “The Deadly Percheron” being a fine instance.
And which do you avoid?
Sensible people tell me I should like stories with zombies, but try as I might, I don’t.
What’s the last book that made you cry?
“Crossing to Safety,” by Wallace Stegner — Charity’s death I found wildly affecting. There were episodes in “Stoner,” by John Williams, that were inexpressibly tear-making too.
The last book that made you furious?
“Infamy,” by Richard Reeves. The whole saga of the wartime internment of 120,000 Americans, simply because they were of Japanese origin, appalls me still: Reeves has raked it all up again, coherently and angrily.
Tell us about your favorite poem.
“The Whitsun Weddings,” by Philip Larkin. My first editor in 1973, Charles Monteith, happened also to be Larkin’s editor (as well as the man who discovered, on a slush pile, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies”). Charles introduced me to Larkin — first not by his poetry, but by way of a tender novel, “A Girl in Winter,” which still I find most moving. Then I started on his poetry, and came to love almost everything he wrote. He spoke to me, as they say. My private vice is railways, and the idea of dozens of newlyweds clambering aboard the same London-bound Saturday train — this “frail travelling coincidence,” as Larkin puts it — I find a model of exquisite observation.
And your favorite fairy tale?
“Rumpelstiltskin.” All that straw.
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?
Not being especially strong or brave, I like tales of those who are: most especially Richard Hannay, the Scots hero of the John Buchan books, all damp tweeds, heather and tobacco, endlessly occupied in saving the world from savagery. He’d be the chap to give ISIS a jolly good biffing, be sure of it. And of all the sad and sour figures I like to loathe? Front and center, Captain Queeg of the U.S.S. Caine.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
Enid Blyton, most especially the Famous Five series (I think I was rather in love with the tomboyish Georgina, an admission which won me some rather odd looks in later life). There was E. Nesbit’s “The Railway Children.” And best of all, “Kim”: The first time I visited Lahore I went to find his great brass cannon, Zam‑Zammah, and it was still there outside the museum. Once my voice broke and I got spots, there was “The Riddle of the Sands,” by Erskine Childers, the best of all sailing adventure spy stories, which I must have read a dozen times before I left school.
If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?
No doubt about it: “Coronation Everest,” by James Morris. He had been the London Times correspondent on the successful 1953 expedition. In 1966 I was a young geologist exploring the Congo-Uganda borderlands, read this book in one sitting in my tent and underwent a classically Pauline conversion. I wrote to James Morris asking if I could possibly be a reporter like him. Both of our lives then changed in very short order: I became a reporter for The Guardian; and James Morris became Jan. We remain friends to this day, together with Elizabeth, her wife.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
“Why Homer Matters,” by Adam Nicolson. The unseemly business of politics seems to chip away at wisdom and sense of moral compass. This wise and wonderfully reflective book places all human activity in the context of Homeric myths first told 4,000 years ago: I like to think that Washington’s powerful, were they to read it, could undergo some kind of redemption, to the benefit of us all.
You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?
Dead: W. H. Auden; Anthony Burgess; Christopher Hitchens. (Always assuming, of course, a limitless supply of booze: Auden had a habit of draining every gin and tonic placed on a dining table.) Living: Nicholson Baker, T. C. Boyle, Pico Iyer.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
There are all too many in the last category, but it would be unkind and ungenerous to mention anyone living. “To the Lighthouse,” by Virginia Woolf, puzzles and defeats me still. But I really cannot stand the all-too-mannered writings of either Henry James or Edith Wharton, heretical though it may be for me to say so, as a newly made American citizen. I daresay there will be consequences: I have to assume that even though I live close by, I’ll not be invited back to the Mount any time soon.
Whom would you want to write your life story?
As if anyone should really care? But in fact I have been lucky to have lived a pretty interesting, world-wandering life, mostly as a foreign correspondent, so I’ll ask for Bob Schieffer, newly retired from CBS. He and I first met in 1982 in Argentina when I was in prison on spying charges, so his first chapter would almost write itself.
Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?
I am of course most grateful of all to those who bought and liked “The Professor and the Madman,” the success of which truly changed my life. Yet I still have great affection for “The River at the Center of the World,” which in commercial terms remains almost invisible. I took some many months in 1997 to journey gently westward into China and Tibet along the 4,000 miles of the entire length of the Yangtze, trying to divine its symbolic importance in creating — and dividing — the immense enigma that is China. It was a journey of great meaning, and I came to love the country deeply. My cool and courageous guide, Lily, died recently, and my admiration for her is matched by my remembered pleasure of a quite extraordinary adventure.
Describe your ideal reading experience.
I recently carried some shabby old Adirondack chairs deep into a discovered clearing in an Eastern white pine forest in the Massachusetts village where I live, and I now come there to read when I can, immersed in shade and birdsong. I read until it is too dark, and then grope my way home to dinner.
What do you plan to read next?
I am mesmerized by the writing and the strange life of T. S. Eliot — so Robert Crawford’s “Young Eliot” must be next on my list. That, and the galleys of the forthcoming official history of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, which will surely be a treasure-house — a thesaurus, indeed — of lexical delights.
Download high res bio photo
Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, Atlantic, Pacific, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006 Mr. Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen. He lives in western Massachusetts. His latest book is The Perfectionists.
Author Website
http://www.simonwinchester.com
QUOTED: "Winchester's latest is a rollicking work of pop science that entertains and informs."
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Publishers Weekly. 265.12 (Mar. 19, 2018): p65+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Simon Winchester. Harper, $29.99 (432p)
ISBN 978-0-06-265255-3
Winchester (The Professor and the Madman) smoothly mixes history, science, and biographical sketches to pay homage to the work of precision engineers, whom he credits with the creation of everything from unpickable locks to gravity wave detectors and the Hubble Telescope. He credits the start of modern precision engineering to "iron-mad" John Wilkinson, an eccentric 18th-century English engineer whose method for casting and boring iron cannons led to the manufacture of smooth-running pistons and cylinders that were then used in the steam engines of James Watt. The son of a precision engineer, Winchester clearly delights in the topic, relating his stories with verve, enthusiasm, and wit. Henry Royce and the Rolls-Royce automobiles he designed contrast with Henry Ford's inexpensive, "reliably unreliable" barebones assembly line cars. The author paints historic characters vividly, including engineer Joseph Whitworth, described as "large and bearded and oyster-eyed"; cabinet-maker Joseph Bramah, who patented the flush toilet; tech aficionado Prince Albert; and rapacious businessman Eli Whitney, who lied about using Frenchman Honore Blanc's idea for standardized parts for flintlocks in his winning bid for a U.S. government contract for 10,000 muskets. Winchester's latest is a rollicking work of pop science that entertains and informs. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World." Publishers Weekly, 19 Mar. 2018, p. 65+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A531977381/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=68a05bce. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A531977381
QUOTED: "Another gem from one of the world's justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people."
The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
Carl Hays
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p11.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. By Simon Winchester. May 2018.384p. Harper, 529.99 (9780062652553). 620.0045.
As much as we value our contemporary high-tech conveniences, from cell phones to fuel-injected cars, few have ever considered a vitally important feature that keeps them all running smoothly, precision engineering. With his customary flair for transforming arcane subjects into engaging prose, Winchester (Pacific, 2015) recounts the achievements of several little-known inventors who revolutionized global industry and effectively made all of our modern gadgets possible with their finely crafted machinery. Although Winchester begins by giving due credit to the clockmakers who kept the British railways on-schedule, in his view the first pioneer of precision-tooled instruments was eighteenth-century English industrialist John "Iron-Mad" Winchester, who constructed the painstakingly accurate boring machines that produced cast-iron cylinders for steam engines. Other innovators profiled include Joseph Bramah (the hydraulic press), Jesse Ramsden (refracting telescopes), and Joseph Whitworth (precision machine tools). While Winchester underscores the importance these mens contributions have ultimately made to today's world of endlessly reproducible goods, he also contemplates whether in all this sameness and precision there isn't still room for less accurate but no less valuable craftsmanship. Another gem from one of the world's justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people.--Carl Hays
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Another reader-pleaser from perennially best-selling Winchester.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hays, Carl. "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 11. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250769/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=262205a0. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250769
QUOTED: "Less a work of scholarship than an enthusiastic popular-science tour of technological marvels, and readers will love the ride."
Winchester, Simon: THE PERFECTIONISTS
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Winchester, Simon THE PERFECTIONISTS Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Nonfiction) $29.99 5, 8 ISBN: 978-0-06-265255-3
An ingenious argument that the dazzling advances that produced the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the revolutions that followed owe their success to a single engineering element: precision.
Early on in this entertaining narrative, bestselling journalist and historian Winchester (Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators and Fading Empires, 2015), whose father "was for all of his working life a precision engineer," points out that James Watt (1736-1819) invented a vastly improved steam engine, but John Wilkinson (1728-1808) made it work. Watt's pistons generated enormous energy but moved inside handmade sheet metal cylinders that leaked profusely under the pressure. After years of frustration, he was rescued by Wilkinson, who had invented a machine that bored a precise hole through a solid block of iron. It had already revolutionized cannon manufacture, and it did the same for Watt's steam engine. Human precision made the Rolls-Royce, which earned the reputation "for precision products made beyond consideration of price," expensive, but engineering precision made the Model T cheap. An assembly line must stop if one mass-produced part doesn't fit perfectly into the next, so Henry Ford spared no expense to ensure that it did. Winchester tells the story of a series of increasingly impressive inventions, usually introduced by a journalistic "hook" to engage readers--e.g., an account of an explosion aboard the world's largest commercial airliner in 2010 precedes his history of the jet engine. In the final chapter, the author does not deny that something vital is lost when human craftsmanship bows before technical perfection, but it's clear where his heart lies. He sought some answers in Japan, which displays "an aesthetic sensibility wherein asymmetry and roughness and impermanence are accorded every bit as much weight as are the exact, the immaculate, and the precise."
Less a work of scholarship than an enthusiastic popular-science tour of technological marvels, and readers will love the ride.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Winchester, Simon: THE PERFECTIONISTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=65ea99d6. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959933
QUOTED: "a vivid and compelling read."
When the Sky Breaks
Children's Bookwatch. (Feb. 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/cbw/index.htm
Full Text:
When the Sky Breaks
Simon Winchester
Viking Books for Young Readers
c/o Penguin Putnam Inc.
345 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.penguin.com
9780451476357, $22.99, www.penguin.com/youngreaders
When the Sky Breaks: Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and the Worst Weather in the World uses the collection of the Smithsonian and information from its experts to examine weather phenomena and how violent storms are made, exploring a range of processes and issues related to meteorological measurement and events. Kids ages 10 and up--including many an adult--will find this survey offers many striking color photos of storm activity while history and science blends to cover memorable storms and scientific investigations of forces of nature. The result is a vivid and compelling read recommended for anyone with an interest in weather phenomenon.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"When the Sky Breaks." Children's Bookwatch, Feb. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485971372/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f0a78a6e. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971372
QUOTED: "a vivid and revealing read."
When the Earth Shakes
Children's Bookwatch. (Sept. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/cbw/index.htm
Full Text:
When the Earth Shakes
Simon Winchester
Viking
c/o Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street, 15th floor, New York, NY 10014
9780670895360 $18.99 www.penguin.com/youngreaders
New York Times journalist, explorer and scientist Simon Winchester has crossed the world to explore the facts about earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, and provides them here in a vivid and revealing read that ranges from discussions of the science behind world-changing events to the modern-day natural disasters that have affected humans around the world. Color photos, vintage historical images, art, and science blend in a presentation that is lively and contemporary, promising to involve readers with good picture book reading skills in a scientific and human exploration.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"When the Earth Shakes." Children's Bookwatch, Sept. 2015. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A430168598/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5a79cf3c. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A430168598
QUOTED: "This title works both as a basic overview of earth science and as a fine example of how to incorporate personal narrative into nonfiction."
Winchester, Simon. When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis
Amy Thurow
School Library Journal. 61.11 (Nov. 2015): p138+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* WINCHESTER, Simon. When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis. 80p. diags. filmog. further reading. index. maps. photos. websites. Viking. 2015. Tr $18.99. ISBN 9780670785360.
Gr 5-8--Winchester, a journalist and former geologist, examines earth-shaking phenomena. In the opening pages, the author discusses his experience on a university research team that confirmed the key scientific theory of continental drift; his powerful writing conveys the excitement of discovery. After this first chapter, descriptions of earthquakes, volcanos, and tsunamis are told in the third person. This contrast between personal narrative and straightforward factual writing is incredibly effective and makes the book an excellent mentor text for demonstrating the differences among various narrative styles. The visuals, too, are strong. Spectacular photographs are included, such as an aerial view of the San Andreas fault and images of the devastation following the 2004 tsunami. A reproduction of Edvard Munch's The Scream is included, and Winchester explains that the vivid sunset that the artist portrayed was caused by dust from the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa. There are several diagrams of cross-cuts of the rock formations found below the surface of the earth (with simple yet thorough captions). Information about the Richter scale and a similar scale that describes volcanos' intensity are also incorporated. The in-depth index is outstanding. An afterword warns readers of the importance of protecting the planet, and Winchester closes with the words "We inhabit this planet subject to geological consent--which can be withdrawn at any time, and without notice." VERDICT A must-buy for libraries serving middle school, this title works both as a basic overview of earth science and as a fine example of how to incorporate personal narrative into nonfiction.--Amy Thurow, New Glarus School District, WI
KEY: * Excellent in relation to other titles on the same subject or in the same genre | e eBook original Tr Hardcover trade binding | RTE Reinforced trade binding | lib. ed. Publisher's library binding Board Board book | pap. Paperback | BL Bilingual
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thurow, Amy. "Winchester, Simon. When the Earth Shakes: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Tsunamis." School Library Journal, Nov. 2015, p. 138+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A433878190/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ad8c8dca. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A433878190
QUOTED: "The story Winchester tells is one of steady, almost inexorably increasing complexity, and this can make the book's later sections heavier going for the lay reader."
"It's a testament to Winchester's narrative skill, honed over two dozen books, that he makes even the most arcane of technical specifics smoothly comprehensible in context—no mean feat when he's dealing with something like extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV)."
'The Perfectionists' manages to make precision engineering fascinating
Steve Donoghue
The Christian Science Monitor. (May 11, 2018): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Steve Donoghue
"The emphasis in 'bestseller'," bestselling author James Michener used to say, "properly falls on 'best.'"
It was a quiet bit of boasting from a mild-mannered man who'd managed to make a New York Times bestseller out of an almost-700-page historical novel about Poland, but it's worth remembering when readers consider the latest book from another bestselling author, Simon Winchester. The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World is in large part a protracted study of ball bearings, chrome-plated telescope components, mass-produced crankshafts, and whatever the heck the the Hadron Collider is. This is recidivist behavior for Winchester, who regularly chooses for his books subjects that aren't exactly general knowledge and then makes bestsellers out of those books in exactly the Michener way: by making everything he writes fascinating.
When it comes to "The Perfectionists," then, perhaps the more apropos Michener quote is: "Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them." Winchester's new book is about the raw engineering and precision manufacturing that makes the dreams of scientists possible.
Winchester is a champion humanizer; it's the foremost of his many writing skills. He sifts through the historical record, builds impressive bibliographies, and then crafts it all into three-dimensional characters. Readers will remember this, for instance, from his beloved hit book "The Professor and the Madman," and it's on full display in "The Perfectionists."
The book starts, ironically with a man who did his work before the age of precision engineering. The first in Winchester's gallery of heroes is the redoubtable 18th-century English clockmaker Johh Harrison, who labored for years on instruments that could be used on ships at sea in order to determine longitude, a problem that had long eluded both curious specialists and greedy shipping magnates. Harrison's clocks solved the problem (a story famously told in Dava Sobel's 1998 blockbuster "Longitude"), as Winchester recounts with a very winning sense of awe: "It remains a mystery just how, without the use of precision machine tools.... Harrison was able to accomplish all this," he writes. "The notion that such work could possibly be done by the hand of a sixty-year-old John Harrison still beggars belief."
In Harrison's wake came all the precision engineers who would increasingly use machines to construct every more precise machines. A great many of those engineers will be unknown to readers - figures like hydraulic engineer Joseph Bramah or British mathematician Jesse Ramsden, whose astronomical instruments were famed for their exacting accuracy. Other names in the roster are more familiar, although often here presented in new lights. The story of famous auto-maker Henry Ford, for instance, takes on new dimensions when told alongside that of Henry Royce, one of the founders of the iconic Rolls-Royce manufacturers.
"Had there been more justice in the world," Winchester puckishly points out, "the company would have been named Royce-Rolls, as Henry Royce was the man who made the cars, while Charles Rolls simply (and flamboyantly) sold them."
Winchester carefully and entertainingly furthers his story from mechanics to precision to hyper-precision of the kind that, for example, led to the great line of Leica lenses prized by photographers for decades. "There are certain ineradicable truths in the world of optical hyperprecision," he writes, "and one of them, by near-universal agreement, is that the best Leica lenses are and long have been of unsurpassed quality, and deservedly represent the cynosure of the optical arts."
The story Winchester tells is one of steady, almost inexorably increasing complexity, and this can make the book's later sections heavier going for the lay reader. "The mechanical polishing and grinding," of complex lenses, those readers are told, "is performed to one-quarter lambda, or one-quarter of the wavelength of light, with lens surfaces machined to tolerances of 500 nanometers, or 0.0005 mm."
It's a testament to Winchester's narrative skill, honed over two dozen books, that he makes even the most arcane of technical specifics smoothly comprehensible in context - no mean feat when he's dealing with something like extreme ultraviolet radiation (EUV), which has "a specific wavelength of 13.5 billionths of a meter" and is best produced "by firing a conventional high-powered laser at a suitable metal."
"The Perfectionists" is at heart an account of the unsung heroes of our modern world. Our skies are criss-crossed by satellites; our horizons are dotted with cell-towers; our hospitals are stocked with portable miracle-machines; we carry in our pockets phones with greater computing complexity than the vast banks of data processors that put humans on the moon only half a century ago. All of these things were made possible by the reclusive, obsessive perfectionists who get their just praise in these pages.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Donoghue, Steve. "'The Perfectionists' manages to make precision engineering fascinating." Christian Science Monitor, 11 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538234800/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=103ffd18. Accessed 3 Nov. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538234800