August 1999

Author	Title	Description
Simon Winchester	The Surgeon of Crowthorne Buy it from Amazon UK	Ever wondered about how you would go about writing a dictionary? How do you find all the words, then write definitions for them? This book describes a small part of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. The surgeon of Crowthorne, Dr Minor, was one of many people who contributed to the compilation of the dictionary, by finding quotes which illustrated the usage of particular words and sending them to the editors. You may have heard that the surgeon actually lived in Broadmoor Asylum, but the details of how he got there, the beginnings of the dictionary and how Dr. Minor became involved are fascinating.
Harry Gallagher	Memories of a Fox Buy it from Amazon UK	As an amateur swimmer, I found this autobiography of the coach of Australian Olympic swimmers Dawn Fraser and Jon Henricks, amongst others, an entertaining and easy read, though it was irritatingly light on details sometimes. Harry Gallagher grew up in the working class suburb of Tempe, Sydney and spent his childhood playing in the local tip and swimming in the nearby polluted Cooks River. The glimpses of life as it was during the Depression are fascinating. Harry tells of his money-making schemes, such as collecting discarded sawdust from the tip to resell. On one occasion it rained heavily as he was trying to take it home in a wheelbarrow, and he had to abandon the sodden unmanageable mass in the gutter. It's not clear what made Harry decide that his career lay in swimming coaching and that's where I felt the book failed. He states that he will make his living from teaching and training swimmers but up to that point there was no obvious love of the sport. We know that he swam as a child, he taught some mates in the Army to swim, and he frequented the local pool when he was living in Punchbowl, but there is no sense that it was more than a hobby to him. I enjoyed the rivalry between Harry's team and those of more established coaches, and his friendship with Gloria and the mystery of what happened to her also contributed to this book being well worth the money I paid for it.

Author

Title

Description

Simon Winchester

The Surgeon of Crowthorne

Ever wondered about how you would go about writing a dictionary? How do you find all the words, then write definitions for them? This book describes a small part of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary. The surgeon of Crowthorne, Dr Minor, was one of many people who contributed to the compilation of the dictionary, by finding quotes which illustrated the usage of particular words and sending them to the editors. You may have heard that the surgeon actually lived in Broadmoor Asylum, but the details of how he got there, the beginnings of the dictionary and how Dr. Minor became involved are fascinating.

Harry Gallagher

Memories of a Fox

Buy it from Amazon UK

As an amateur swimmer, I found this autobiography of the coach of Australian Olympic swimmers Dawn Fraser and Jon Henricks, amongst others, an entertaining and easy read, though it was irritatingly light on details sometimes.

Harry Gallagher grew up in the working class suburb of Tempe, Sydney and spent his childhood playing in the local tip and swimming in the nearby polluted Cooks River. The glimpses of life as it was during the Depression are fascinating. Harry tells of his money-making schemes, such as collecting discarded sawdust from the tip to resell. On one occasion it rained heavily as he was trying to take it home in a wheelbarrow, and he had to abandon the sodden unmanageable mass in the gutter.

It's not clear what made Harry decide that his career lay in swimming coaching and that's where I felt the book failed. He states that he will make his living from teaching and training swimmers but up to that point there was no obvious love of the sport. We know that he swam as a child, he taught some mates in the Army to swim, and he frequented the local pool when he was living in Punchbowl, but there is no sense that it was more than a hobby to him.

I enjoyed the rivalry between Harry's team and those of more established coaches, and his friendship with Gloria and the mystery of what happened to her also contributed to this book being well worth the money I paid for it.

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