The Man Who Made the Lists

Aberration, absurdity, craziness, delirium, delusion, dementia …

By DANIEL SHVARTSMAN

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Roget's Thesaurus was once a staple for essay writers and college freshmen, squeezing in between Webster's Dictionary and Strunk & White's Elements of Style. For most, shift+F7 has conveniently replaced it, but Roget's remains the godfather of the field. And while nothing could be as fascinating as finding synonyms for fastidious, Peter Mark Roget's life was apparently pretty juicy on its own and Joshua Kendall is telling his story.

The Man Who Made The Lists is Kendall's new book, a biography of Roget (1779-1869). Faced with the confusion and sadness of his life (his father died young, his uncle committed suicide, his mother and grandmother went crazy), Roget found refuge in making lists, and ultimately in completing his life work, the Thesaurus. Kendall, a freelance writer based out of Boston, argues that Roget resorted to lists as a means of ordering the chaos around him. Fortunately, he also had time to invent the slide rule, test laughing gas and avoid arrest in Napoleonic France.

Between calculators, computers, the internet, and YouTube, many of Roget's specific innovations have been rendered obsolete. Still, the notion of a catchall guide to finding out that they're archaic too is an idea that's everlasting—madness as the mother of faux erudition.

JOSHUA KENDALL

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