Book Alert / The Man Who Made Lists

The Man Who Made Lists -- Love, Death, Madness and the Creation of Roget's Thesaurus by Joshua Kendall, $25.95, 297 pages, ISBN #0399154620. Index, no bibliography, source notes or illustrations.

Were Peter Mark Roget and his extended family alive today, one of their chief concerns would be securing health insurance to cover the medical and psychiatric treatment and therapy their various maladies required. And they'd no doubt be a healthier lot than they were in the mid- 1800s: Roget's grandmother spent most of her life in "an almost vegetative state." His uncle, a member of Parliament, slit his own throat. Paranoia kept his mother from properly nurturing her own children. Roget's sister and daughter fought disabling bouts of depression.

Roget -- yes, the same Roget who increased our grades on college term papers with his Thesaurus -- wasn't exactly a picture of health himself. He suffered since childhood from what today would be called obsessive-compulsive disorder, yet managed to become a physician. And when he tired of that, he channeled his making of lists of everything in the world around him into hundreds of categories, which eventually he would group together into Roget's Thesaurus at age 73, 65 years after he had begun compulsively making lists. As Kendall explains, listmaking helped make sense of the world to a man who lacked the social cues available to most of us.

Today, such psychiatric maladies as obsessive-compulsive disorder keep ballations of therapists gainfully employed. As the grandfather of a 7-year-old autistic child, I've been fortunate to watch up close the ministrations of those who purport to "rewire the mind from the outside." We are indeed fortunate to live in a time in which people with serious mental disorders can hope to live productive self-sufficient lives.

Not so in Roget's time, which makes his own story so remarkable. For while he had a condition that  caused him to see the world in some ways as two-dimensional and which would have disabled many people, he was able to channel his particular skill set to a use so productive that his Thesaurus is still popular nearly two centuries after its compilation.

As Joshua Kendall reminds us in his graceful narrative, "Roget's was not a project that Peter Mark Roget ever chose -- his obsessions and compulsions hardly gave him the latitude not to work on it. Ever since childhood, burying himself in words was the only survival strategy available to him. Ultimately, Roget's -- along with all the decades of preparatory work -- did much more for its creator than it has done for its hundreds of millions of users across the centuries; it enabled Roget to live a vibrant life in the face of overwhelming loss, anxiety, and despair. This personal feat was an equally impressive achievement." Successful and engaged through his later life, Roget died peacefully shortly before his 91st birthday.

Author Joshua Kendall, a summa cum laude Yale graduate, is a language enthusiast and Boston-based freelance journalist.