Simon Winchester has died

Well, that sucks. He's one of my favorite authors. I recommend the audiobooks which he reads himself.

I especially liked "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World" and "Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic".

But all of his works are great.

He wrote a fantastic biography of Joseph Needham, a chemist at Cambridge who learned Chinese in his 30s and subsequently created an exhaustively thorough history of scientific discovery in ancient China that was published as a gigantic set of encyclopedias. The research into Needham's wartime travels in China (relying on university and Foreign Office archives) was top notch.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/28/biography3

Oh, that's too bad! I read my first Winchester, The Perfectionists, just this year, and a couple of other beside. Enjoyable and educational, the epitome of this type of non-fiction.

His book on small British holdings in the 90s, Outposts, was an amazing read. He was a gifted writer who could humanize without romantize.

My introduction to his work was Kraktoa: the Day the World Exploded. A fascinating read.

Pacific (given I’m in California and visit Asia often) has been one of my favorites.

Glad he was so prolific before passing away.

One of the best travel stories I’ve ever read was by Simon Winchester: The Most Perfect Hotel in the World

Well that sucks. "The Professor and the Madman" is one of my favorite books.

The madman kicked ass. A broken person can do unbroken work.

If you enjoyed Stewart Brand's Maintenance you probably would also enjoy Winchester's The Perfectionists. Below is Brand on Winchester [0].

  Winchester’s book really shows how precision helps to drive progress. For Watt, a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch made his steam engines efficient. In Ford’s day, engineers and manufacturers could be precise at the level of a millionth of an inch. Today, chip fabricators have gotten things down to five nanometres. And, as the saying goes, a nanometre is to a tennis ball as a tennis ball is to the whole earth.

0. https://www.newyorker.com/books/book-currents/stewart-brand-...

I can also recommend the movie named after the American title of his Oxford English Dictionary book.

> Simon Winchester was born in London on Sept. 28, 1944. He was the only child of Bernard and Andrée Winchester (de Wael.) By some accounts, his father, a British soldier, was imprisoned in Nazi Germany at the time of his son’s birth. In interviews, Mr. Winchester has frequently suggested that, when he returned from captivity, his father was not enthusiastic about his young son and sent him to boarding school in England at around the age of 5.

Or "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" if you don't want the dumbed-down-for-the-US-market title.

An important book; one of several that perhaps exists in part because of the room in the market that was carved out by Dava Sobel's Longitude.