From theage.com.au. we have this book review of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book That Defined the World.
If ever words mattered to a man, they mattered to Samuel Johnson. Henry Hitchings draws out both that love and the burden it put upon him in his delightful Dr Johnson's Dictionary.
Johnson completed his Dictionary of the English Language 250 years ago. It had taken him and a small band of helpers eight years of dour, dull and dispiriting work to compile.
It was a towering achievement by a man dogged by depression, who having worked out a battle plan to spear every word through the heart, found the plan unworkable and had to start again three years into the project.
Hitchings takes the reader through the A to Z of this massive endeavour and, in a nice touch, labels each chapter in descending order of the alphabet. Thus we start with "Adventurous" and end with "Zootomy" (dissection of the bodies of beasts).
Dissection is a particularly apt word. Johnson's mind was constantly abuzz with the swish and flash of his mental blade cutting into the lexicon. Hitchings does more than show the methodology; he shows the man behind that method, and what seems a madness to pursue such a course. [continue]
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The A-Z of Samuel Johnson