Customer Reviews

The Man Who Made Lists

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4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It could be argued that a generation from now the man whose name is synonymous with synonyms might very well be forgotten, thanks to computer-based websites that offer up what Peter Roget first published in 1852. Joshua Kendall offers a glimpse of a man who was a medical doctor by profession but made his lasting name through his "avocation"... a word not known in Roget's day. It is revealing but incomplete.

Peter Mark Roget was descended from a lineage that seemed to produce more than its fair share of depressed family members. His mother never quite recovered from her husband's early death, his sister, jilted as a young love, suffered bouts of lifelong melancholy and his famous uncle, so set off by grief from his wife's death that he took his own, all contributed to Roget's own depression. Given the fact that Roget lived to be ninety is no small order, but "order" is the very word by which he lived. Shutting out the very emotions that might have given color to his life, Roget turned to listmaking. It is here we are forever grateful to him.

Kendall's biography is rather dry and often flat but he does introduce a humorous chapter (and a profoundly historical one given the Napoleonic times) whereby a young Roget is hired to take the two teenage sons of a wealthy Englishman to Europe for a year or more and give them an education through travel. That the highly unemotional and humorless Dr. Roget could help the boys absorb anything about Paris "through the senses" would have been suspect, and consequently, as the author points out, the sons wrote back to their parents regarding the numbers of statues and pictures that were contained in The Louvre and the number of tower steps and organ pipes at Notre Dame... hardly worth a trip to the City of Light.

What is missing in Kendall's book is any lengthy discourse as to how Roget finally put his thesaurus together, something so sorely lacking that it begs a question as to why it was not included. Everything seems to be in place as to why Roget wrote his thesaurus and had it published, but the process of compilation...that which might have made Roget spring to life... never appears. It's a serious enough omission not to recommend the book itself, but Kendall's look at the personal side of Peter Roget has just enough attraction to warrant a read. Given Roget's historical popularity and standing, I only wish there had been more.

Brevity is the soul of wit. The subject matter is incredibly interesting and the book is well researched. Unfortunately the book is poorly written, so much so that I am going to have to work rather hard to finish it.

Entry Word:
disappoint
Function:
verb
Text: to fall short in satisfying the expectation or hope of<they were disappointed by the outcome of the big game
Synonyms: cheat, dissatisfy, fail, let down

I thought it best to use Roget's own words to express how I felt about this book. It's like a McBio. There is so much left out or unexplained and it isn't till you read the acknowledgments at the end of the book do you find out that the author didn't mean the book to be a scholarly work.
Well what did he mean? He also then admits that "where primary source material was lacking, I offer my best approximation of specific details".
In other words he made them up.

OK the biggest failing of the book is that it is non-sequential which I think is a poor tribute to a man who spent his life trying to bring order and classification to everything in life. Kendall has a habit of digressing to another period for two or three paragraphs and then going back to where he was; so that you go from the 1820s to the 1840s and back
again. Well he gave it a good try and I bet he really tried his best (well I can't prove it but that's the impression I get) but it wasn't good enough.

Zeb Kantrowitz

"It will charm the word nerd in all of us." So says A.J. Jacobs in his quote that graces the front cover of this biography of Peter Mark Roget, the man who made the Thesaurus.

This book is not without its charms, but between "word nerd" and the inclusion of the word "Thesaurus" right in the title, it's hard not to feel like one has been bait-and-switched. Kendall would argue, I suppose, that the story of the Thesaurus is the story of Roget and vice versa, but neither tale is fully developed here. If this is a biography of Roget, we should come away knowing more about the man than we do, but the major events of his life are practically parenthetical. If it is a book about the Thesaurus, that should be the thread we can follow throughout the book, yet Kendall is faithful enough to Roget's life story to lose that plot, just as Roget did, for quite a while.

By being half of one thing and half of another, Kendall's book turns out to be inadequate at either of its purported tasks. And yet it does offer interesting insight into the 19th century worldview, the evolution of science up to the point when evolution itself hit the scene, and the way that, just 200 years ago, anyone might make a remarkable scientific discovery. (Roget himself discovered the principle upon which motion pictures are based by watching a wagon wheel roll by outside his window.) Again, this book is not without merit, but it is neither a complete biography of Roget nor a thorough discussion of his Thesaurus.

As a lover of biographies, I was eager to pick up Joshua Kendall's "The Man Who Made Lists: Love Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus." Further, as the owner of three different versions of "Roget's Thesaurus," which I consult frequently, I was even more highly motivated to read Kendall's book. Perhaps my expectations were too high, for in the end, I was disappointed with the book.

The biggest problem with the book is the subject himself. Peter Mark Roget, though a brilliant scholar, comes off as something of a bumbler. As a boy of four, in 1783, he lost his father to tuberculosis and spent his youth mostly in England under the thumb of his over-bearing mother. She monitored the boy's behavior and education, and rather than "raise any objections to his mother's incursions into his personal space," he sought refuge in reading and making word lists, and, in his mother's opinion, he showed little promise.

Although trained as a medical doctor, he didn't feel he was very good at the practice of medicine, and he was very young, just nineteen years old when he completed his medical degree, writing his thesis entirely in Latin. At the suggestion of his mentors, he engaged in further study, going to work as an assistant to the research chemist, Humphry Davy, who was just a month older than Roget, but Roget found this work frustrating. Next he went to work for another scientific genius, the inventor and social philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and again he fell into a depression.

Continuing his scientific researches, Roget next took on the job of tutor for two English teenage boys, traveling with them to France and Switzerland, where he came close to being imprisoned by agents of Napoleon. Finally at age twenty-five he found work in a medical practice in Manchester, and a year later in 1805, completed the first draft of the manuscript of what was to become his famous book.

In 1809, Roget received his license from the Royal College of Physicians and embarked on a successful career of medical research, lecturing, and writing, making a key discovery about the retina's tendency to see a series of still images as a continuous picture, a "theoretical insight which would eventually lead to the discovery of the movies." He endured a long bachelorhood, being rejected by at least two prospective fiancés, and finally married the lovely Mary Hobson, sixteen years his junior, when he was forty-five. The marriage produced two children, but after eight years of marriage, Mary succumbed to cancer and died in 1833.

Four years after Mary's death, he hired Margaret Spowers as governess, and seven years later began living with her as man and wife until her death in 1852. In 1850 his daughter Kate fell into madness as his mother had twenty-seven years earlier. Finally in 1851, at the age of seventy-three, the book that made Roget's name forever famous was published, and the royalties from its several revised editions allowed him to live comfortably until his death at nearly ninety-one years of age in 1869.

Several things contributed to my disappointment with this biography. The fact that the publication of "Roget's Thesaurus" came so late in his lifetime made it something of an anti-climax. That all of Roget's achievements were of a scholarly or scientific rather than of an adventuresome nature was another contributing factor. And finally, I was disappointed that Kendall did not provide notes. I take it for granted that a work of this nature will be accompanied by comprehensive notes which I refer to as I read along. As much as I admire Roget and his valuable book, I cannot say the same for this biography, which did not, in my opinion, live up to the promise in the author's clever and enticing subtitle, "Love, Death, Madness, and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus."

I was disappointed in this book because I wanted to know all about the creation of Roget's Thesaurus and the author spends less than 10 pages (actually more like 5 pages) on that topic. In fact, by the time the book gets around to this topic, it is very close to the end.

Having finished the book I will share my impressions, but first a few words about some of the criticisms in reviews here at Amazon. For those who said it was poorly written without examples, these comments read as hollow. The well researched book deserves better than this. For those disappointed that this book did not focus more attention on how the Thesaurus was accumulated, I think you miss the point. It was almost a life long obsession that eventually made itself manifest once he was well past his middle age. Kendall's book is a biography, which covers a life time and he does so with great depth. For those bored, well then biographies perhaps are not your cup of tea?

My impression is that Kendall did thorough and substantial research and that he knew not only his subject but the times in which he lived. While Roget, of Swiss background, lived a very unusually long life, it was always full of activity and conflict, hefty challenges that involved those closest to him (his direct and extended family)and endless quests for knowledge. A good portion of his obsession for creating lists was to bring order to his often tumultuous life. While some people develope mental or emotional odd or deviant behavior as a result of badly coping with great stress, Roget found that focussing his powerful intellect towards expositions in science and synonyms, allowed him to vent and direct his anxieties towards non-destructive paths, all of which brought him great respect and fame.

What is really quite extraordinary was the depth of emotional hardship that he had to deal with from a young age. We can also clearly see that on some level (hard to really give it a name) that his family had a large cloud of darkness always close at hand. Madness, suicide, depression were hallmarks that this family was imbued with. Consider though what he overcame. When in France with two young youths under his tutelage and care, war breaks out with the French and Napoleon looks to arrest every single British citizen in France and in lands that the French troops were controlling, which included the Swiss cantons. That story alone is worth reading the book for. Consider that wretchedly weak, clinging, cringing, smothering and needy mother he had, who once having lost her husband turned to obtain life giving reasons to live from her young son. Like a flowering plant looking towards the sun, she obsessively and ruinously used her own child as a vicarious prop to keep herself alive. Living at a time when children had trouble saying no to their parents, keeping decorum and family dirty laundry well hidden, he found his mother to be almost impossible until the day she finally passed on, first having sunk into complete madness. Consider that becoming a Doctor in those days was not the well organized and comprehensive process of our universities today; in those days one had to pursue lecturers and accumulate enough knowledge without the hands on experience of interning in a hospital. Nonetheless, his drive to complete his education was as thorough as most of his intellectual pursuits. Roget loved knowledge and sought out the best and brighest minds at various universities, some up in Scotland.

Roget was something of a small scale polymath. His improvements to the slide rule were widely useful in an era before modern calculating machines. His insights into how the retina and sight operated, according to the author, helped a future generation create the motion picture machines. He wrote an enormous and pre-Darwinian scholarly tome that was very influential in shaping Darwin's own world famous treatise.

Of course Roget is known these days by millions of people for his Thesaurus, his masterpiece. His objective was to help expand the vocabulary of all people so as to fascillitate a clearer exposition of ones own thoughts. This lofty objective has done just that.

I found this book endlessly fascinating, though the life he and his family lived was shot through with so much tragedy and despair. I thoroughly enjoyed learning about his full and successful life. Well recommended.

I picked up this book rather on a whim as I was scouring my local bookstore. It is a biography of Peter Mark Roget, best known for creating his famous thesaurus. It traces the life of a man who was a very odd but still compelling character. As his biographer says, "Though he had a host of female admirers, was one of the first to test the effects of laughing gas, developed the slide rule, and narrowly escaped jail in Napoleon's France, he is best known for making lists." And make lists he did with an almost obsessive passion. Though Kendall occasionally steps beyond what he actually could know from the historical record into the realm of conjecture, he still crafts an interesting biography of a strangely fascinating man.

I enjoyed this book, it felt like a historical romp with fascinating people. I picked up the book because I was intrigued with the underlying story about how a doctor with an apparent obsessive compulsive disorder and crazy family would end up being best known for creating a book that increased my vocabulary and helped me polish many college papers. Roget lived in an amazing time when "poets were scientists," and he defines the Renaissance man, which is something that I had not appreciated prior to reading this book. The book does take many tangents that are usually entertaining as they involve many other famous figures who happen to be friends w/ Roget. (If Roget had written the book himself he would surely have been accused of name dropping). In general, I learned something about this logophile, why he created the Thesaurus and how he thrived in a remarkable era.

I had high hopes for this book, whose audiobook version I am struggling through for the second time. Listening to it is like eating liver; you stick with it because you recognize the merits of doing so, but the experience is not pleasurable and you want it to end as soon as possible.

Part of the problem is the book's reader, Stephen Hoye. His reading is pretentious. That put me off by the end of the first sentence and it was a constant annoyance throughout the book. A more down-to-earth reader, like the readers for Stephen Ambrose's and David McCullough's books, would have helped.

Having enjoyed Simon Winchester's two books about the making of the OED, namely, The Meaning of Everything (2003) and The Professor and the Madman (1998), I expected that this book on Peter Mark Roget and the making of the thesaurus would be equally stimulating and entertaining, especially since the author, Joshua Kendall, presumably would have previously read Winchester's two books and would have picked up some literary pointers from them. Regrettably, no such literary inspiration seems to have occurred.