Simon Winchester Books In Order

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

Simon Winchester, struck by a sudden need to discover exactly what was left of the British Empire, set out across the globe to visit the far flung islands that are all that remain of what once made Britain great. He traveled 100,000 miles back and forth, from Antarctica to the Caribbean, from the Mediterranean to the Far East, to capture a last glint of imperial glory. His adventures in these distant and forgotten ends of the earth make compelling, often funny reading and tell a story most of us had thought was over: a tale of the last outposts in Britain’s imperial career and those who keep the flag flying. With a new introduction, this updated edition tells us what has happened to these extraordinary places while the author’s been away.

Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

In the late 1980s, New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester set out on foot to discover the Republic of Korea from its southern tip to the North Korean border in order to set the record straight about this enigmatic and elusive land. Fascinating for its vivid presentation of historical and geographic detail, Korea is that rare book that actually defines a nation and its people. Winchester’s gift for capturing engaging characters in true, compelling stories provides us with a treasury of enchanting and informed insight on the culture, language, history, and politics of this little known corner of Asia. With a new introduction by the author, Korea is a beautiful journey through a mysterious country and a memorable addition to the many adventures of Simon Winchester.

Pacific Nightmare : How Japan Starts World War III

As a civil war in 2001 China pits north against south, Japan sends in troops from Tokyo, and the U.S. decides to stop Japan in its tracks.

The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time

Rising in the mountains of the Tibetan border, the symbolic heart of China pierces 3,900 miles of rugged country before debouching into the oily swells of the East China Sea. Connecting China’s heartland cities with the volatile coastal giant, Shanghai, it has also historically connected China to the outside world through its nearly one thousand miles of navigable waters. To travel those waters is to travel back in history, to sense the soul of China, and Simon Winchester takes us along with him as he encounters the essence of China its history and politics, its geography and climate as well as engage in its culture, and its people in remote and almost inaccessible places. This is travel writing at its best: lively, informative, and thoroughly enchanting.

The Surgeon of Crowthorne

The making of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the ‘OED’s’ editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him. What he found was incredible Minor was a millionaire American civil war surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder and yet who dedicated his entire cell bound life to work on the English language.

The Professor and the Madman

Mysterious mist e ries, a. f. L. myst rium Mysteryi ous. Cf. F. myst rieux. 1. Full of or fraught with mystery; wrapt in mystery; hidden from human knowledge or understanding; impossible or difficult to explain, solve, or discover; of obscure origin, nature, or purpose. It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray’s offer was regularly and mysteriously refused. Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions to the dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane and locked up in Broadmoor, England’s harshest asylum for criminal lunatics. The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness and genius, and the incredible obsessions of two men at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. With riveting insight and detail, Simon Winchester crafts a fascinating glimpse into one man’s tortured mind and his contribution to another man’s magnificent dictionary.

The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

A True Portrait of One of the World’s Most Chaotic and Beautiful Regions That Explains Why Violence Has Always Occurred There And Why It May Continue For Years To ComeThe vast and mountainous area that makes up the Balkans is rife with discord, both cultural and topographical. And, as Simon Winchester superbly demonstrates in this intimate portrait of the region, much of the political strife of the past century can be traced to its inherent contrasts. With the aid of a guide and linguist, Winchester traveled deep into the region’s most troublesome areas including Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, and Turkey just as the war was tearing these countries apart. The result is a book not just about war but also about how war affects the living. Both timeless and current, The Fracture Zone goes behind the headlines to offer a true picture of a region that has always been on the brink. Winchester’s remarkable journey puts all the elements together the faults, the fractures, and the chaos to make sense out of a seemingly senseless place.

The Map That Changed the World

From the author of the bestselling The Professor and the Madman comes the fascinating story of William Smith, the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became obsessed with creating the world’s first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology. In 1793 William Smith, a canal digger, made a startling discovery that was to turn the fledgling science of the history of the earth and a central plank of established Christian religion on its head. He noticed that the rocks he was excavating were arranged in layers; more important, he could see quite clearly that the fossils found in one layer were very different from those found in another. And out of that realization came an epiphany: that by following the fossils, one could trace layers of rocks as they dipped and rose and fell clear across England and, indeed, clear across the world. Determined to publish his profoundly important discovery by creating a map that would display the hidden underside of England, he spent twenty years traveling the length and breadth of the kingdom by stagecoach and on foot, studying rock outcrops and fossils, piecing together the image of this unseen universe. In 1815 he published his epochal and remarkably beautiful hand painted map, more than eight feet tall and six feet wide. But four years after its triumphant publication, and with his young wife going steadily mad to the point of nymphomania, Smith ended up in debtors’ prison, a victim of plagiarism, swindled out of his recognition and his profits. He left London for the north of England and remained homeless for ten long years as he searched for work. It wasn’t until 1831, when his employer, a sympathetic nobleman, brought him into contact with the Geological Society of London which had earlier denied him a fellowship that at last this quiet genius was showered with the honors long overdue him. He was summoned south to receive the society’s highest award, and King William IV offered him a lifetime pension. The Map That Changed the World is, at its foundation, a very human tale of endurance and achievement, of one man’s dedication in the face of ruin and homelessness. The world’s coal and oil industry, its gold mining, its highway systems, and its railroad routes were all derived entirely from the creation of Smith’s first map.; and with a keen eye and thoughtful detail, Simon Winchester unfolds the poignant sacrifice behind this world changing discovery.

The Meaning Of Everything

From the best selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a lightning history of the English language ‘so vast, so sprawling, so wonderfully unwieldy’ and pays homage to the great dictionary makers, from ‘the irredeemably famous’ Samuel Johnson to the ‘short, pale, smug and boastful’ schoolmaster from New Hartford, Noah Webster. He then turns his unmatched talent for story telling to the making of this most venerable of dictionaries. In this fast paced narrative, the reader will discover lively portraits of such key figures as the brilliant but tubercular first editor Herbert Coleridge grandson of the poet, the colorful, boisterous Frederick Furnivall who left the project in a shambles, and James Augustus Henry Murray, who spent a half century bringing the project to fruition. Winchester lovingly describes the nuts and bolts of dictionary making how unexpectedly tricky the dictionary entry for marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated and how bondmaid was left out completely, its slips found lurking under a pile of books long after the B volume had gone to press. We visit the ugly corrugated iron structure that Murray grandly dubbed the Scriptorium the Scrippy or the Shed, as locals called it and meet some of the legion of volunteers, from Fitzedward Hall, a bitter hermit obsessively devoted to the OED, to W. C. Minor, whose story is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption. The Meaning Of Everything is a scintillating account of the creation of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language. Simon Winchester’s supple, vigorous prose illuminates this dauntingly ambitious project a seventy year odyssey to create the grandfather of all word books, the world’s unrivalled uber dictionary.

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883

The bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and The Map That Changed the World examines the enduring and world changing effects of the catastrophic eruption off the coast of Java of the earth’s most dangerous volcano Krakatoa. The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano island of Krakatoa the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogot and Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island’s destruction was heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all in view of today’s new political climate the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims: one of the first outbreaks of Islamic inspired killings anywhere. Simon Winchester’s long experience in the world wandering as well as his knowledge of history and geology give us an entirely new perspective on this fascinating and iconic event as he brings it telling back to life.

Simon Winchester’s Calcutta

Calcutta is a city in a state of permanent surprise, where amazement is around every crumbling corner, and astonishment lurks over every rickshaw puller’s shoulder. It is a city that never ceases to shock those who pass through, and it is also a city that manages to delight and enthrall those who are stalwart enough to stay and brave enough to make an effort to look, and to see.

Best selling writer Simon Winchester explores his love hate relationship with Calcutta, a city that provokes intense reactions in all who visit. Collaborating with his son Rupert, Simon muses on his time spent in Calcutta, reflecting on his experiences, preconceptions and own individual fascination with the city.

The Winchesters’ personal essays are presented with a selection of wide ranging extracts penned by other visitors to this surprising city. The result is a personal view of one of the world’s most resonant destinations that also acts as an essential introduction to the wealth of writing on the subject.

Includes extracts by V.S. Naipaul, Paul Theroux, Rudyard Kipling, Geoffrey Moorhouse, Rabindranath Tagore, N.C. Chaudhuri, Gunter Grass, Dominique Lapierre, James Morris, Mark Twain and Vikram Seth.

Simon Winchester’s Calcutta provides a rare insight into the inspiration writers gain from their love for a special place.

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906

The international bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Krakatoa vividly brings to life the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake that leveled a city symbolic of America’s relentless western expansion. Simon Winchester has also fashioned an enthralling and informative look at the tumultuous subterranean world that produces earthquakes, the planet’s most sudden and destructive force.

In the early morning hours of April 18, 1906, San Francisco and a string of other towns were overcome by an earthquake registering 8. 25 on the Richter scale, resulting from a rupture in the San Andreas fault. Lasting little more than a minute, the earthquake wrecked 490 blocks, toppled a total of 25,000 buildings, broke open gas mains, cut off electric power lines, and effectively destroyed the gold rush capital that had stood there for a half century.

Winchester brings his inimitable storytelling abilities as well as his unique understanding of geology to this extraordinary event, exploring not only what happened in northern California in 1906 but what we have learned since about the geological underpinnings that caused the earthquake in the first place. A Crack in the Edge of the World is the definitive account of the San Francisco earthquake and a fascinating exploration of a legendary event that changed the way we look at the planet on which we live.

The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

In sumptuous and illuminating detail, Simon Winchester, the bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman ‘Elegant and scrupulous’ New York Times Book Review and Krakatoa ‘A mesmerizing page turner’ Time brings to life the extraordinary story of Joseph Needham, the brilliant Cambridge scientist who unlocked the most closely held secrets of China, long the world’s most technologically advanced country. No cloistered don, this tall, married Englishman was a freethinking intellectual, who practiced nudism and was devoted to a quirky brand of folk dancing. In 1937, while working as a biochemist at Cambridge University, he instantly fell in love with a visiting Chinese student, with whom he began a lifelong affair. He soon became fascinated with China, and his mistress swiftly persuaded the ever enthusiastic Needham to travel to her home country, where he embarked on a series of extraordinary expeditions to the farthest frontiers of this ancient empire. He searched everywhere for evidence to bolster his conviction that the Chinese were responsible for hundreds of mankind’s most familiar innovations including printing, the compass, explosives, suspension bridges, even toilet paper often centuries before the rest of the world. His thrilling and dangerous journeys, vividly recreated by Winchester, took him across war torn China to far flung outposts, consolidating his deep admiration for the Chinese people. After the war, Needham was determined to tell the world what he had discovered, and began writing his majestic Science and Civilisation in China, describing the country’s long and astonishing history of invention and technology. By the time he died, he had produced, essentially single handedly, seventeen immense volumes, marking him as the greatest one man encyclopedist ever. Both epic and intimate, The Man Who Loved China tells the sweeping story of China through Needham’s remarkable life. Here is an unforgettable tale of what makes men, nations, and, indeed, mankind itself great related by one of the world’s inimitable storytellers.

Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China

Before fate intervened, Joseph Needham was a distinguished biochemist at Cambridge University, married to a fellow scientist. In 1937 he was asked to supervise a young Chinese student named Lu Gwei Djen, and in that moment began the two greatest love affairs of his life Miss Lu, and China. Miss Lu inspired Needham to travel to China where he initially spent three dangerous years as a wartime diplomat. By the end of his life, Needham had become the pre eminent China scholar of all time, a truly global figure, travelling endlessly and honoured by all. And in 1989, after a fifty two year affair, he finally married the woman who had first inspired his passion. ‘Bomb, Book and Compass’ is Simon Winchester at his best at once a magnificent portrait of one man’s remarkable life and a riveting exploration of the country that so engaged him.

The Best American Travel Writing 2009

Acclaimed writer Simon Winchester brings his keen literary eye to this year’s volume of the finest travel writing from the past year. ‘Full of insights, humor, the exotic and distant, and the ordinary and near’ Library Journal this collection finds ‘a perfect mix of exotic locale and elegant prose’ Publishers Weekly.

Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories

The epic life story of the Atlantic Ocean from the bestselling author, Simon Winchester For thousands of years the Atlantic Ocean was viewed by mariners with a mixture of awe, terror and amazement an impassable barrier to the unknown. In recent times, as we fly high above it without so much as bothering to look down, this vast sea has been reduced to the status of a mere passageway between continents ‘the pond’. It is easy to forget that the Atlantic has been the setting for some of the most important exchanges, ideas and challenges in the history of civilisation a fulcrum around which the power and influence of the modern world has long been distributed. In this narrative tour de force, Simon Winchester dramatises the life story of the Atlantic, from its birth in the farther recesses of geological time to its eventual extinction millions of years in the future. At the heart of the book is the story of humankind’s evolving attitude to and relationship with the ocean. For millennia it has shaped the lives and cultures of those who have lived along its shores and have navigated its waters. Travelling around its edges and across its huge expanse, Winchester reports from the places that encapsulate the Atlantic’s most fascinating stories the age of exploration and the colonisation of the Americas; the rise and fall of the slave trade, and the flourishing of transatlantic commerce; extraordinary tales of sea borne emigration; and the great naval battles that have left an indelible imprint on Atlantic history. The result is an utterly enthralling mixture of history, science and reportage from a master of narrative non fiction, and an exhilarating account of a magnificent body of water.

The Alice Behind Wonderland

On a summer’s day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six year old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature. Dodgson’s love of photography framed his view of the world, and was partly responsible for transforming a shy and half deaf mathematician into one of the world’s best loved observers of childhood. Little wonder that there is more to ‘Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid’ than meets the eye. Using Dodgson’s published writings, private diaries, and of course his photographic portraits, Winchester gently exposes the development of Lewis Carroll and the making of his Alice. Acclaim for Simon Winchester’An exceptionally engaging guide at home everywhere, ready for anything, full of gusto and seemingly omnivorous curiosity.’ Pico Iyer, The New York Times Book Review ‘A master at telling a complex story compellingly and lucidly.’ USA Today’Extraordinarily graceful.’ Time’Winchester is an exquisite writer and a deft anecdoteur.’ Christopher Buckley’A lyrical writer and an indefatigable researcher.’ Newsweek