Customer Reviews

Chambers Biographical Dictionary (Larousse Biographical Dictionary)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is described by the publishers as "20,000 profiles of famous men and women ranging from the mainstream to the controversial, and spanning the centuries, from the earliest times to the present day." Apart from the poor use of punctuation - in a so-called dictionary!, on using the book, I immediately found this statement to be far from accurate.

As one would expect, there are some very big names; Einstein, Eisenhower, Churchill, Mohammed Ali, Lawrence Olivier to mention but 5. On the other side of the coin, however, there are also a great many obscure people - Churchill's son, for example, appears to have been included simply because of his famous father. Naturally, those who are obscure to one person will be well known to others with an interest in whatever field of expertise applies. In my case, I am a former soldier and I was exceedingly disappointed by the absence of some very notable Generals and Field Marshalls and people of equivalent rank in other services.

Whilst nobody can be proficient in all fields of endeavour, if the lack of such notable military figures is repeated across other areas of interest (and Colin Powell is also absent from my copy!) then this book will only serve to disappoint those who purchase the product in order to read about the leading people in their particular sphere of interest.

Another relevant point is that any "true" dictionary includes the means of identifying how a word (in this case a person's name) should be pronounced. Here there is no such guidance at all. Not all names are as obvious as others and, as we in the UK came to learn some years ago, there exists some very different pronunciations of even simple names such as Colin.

Whilst later versions will have more names added, the work must be described as a rather disappointing effort from such a notable publishing company.

NM