Roget's Thesaurus has been a source of controversy among linguists, writers, and frustrated English teachers since it was first published in 1852. The Man Who Made Lists reveals that it's also an emblem of one man's obsession with the complexities and nuances of language. In this account, Joshua Kendall describes the life and work of Peter Mark Roget, a 19th-century physician who found solace from a troubled life by classifying the world around him.

Although it took him nearly 50 years to complete his thesaurus, Roget's meticulousness developed early, in part as a coping mechanism to help him deal with a series of unexpected tragedies. Fatherless by the age of four and burdened by a depressive and dependent mother, Roget found that making lists and categorizing items brought him relief. As a child, he excelled in the sciences and eventually became a founding member of the Royal Society of Medicine. Yet despite his professional success, Roget's personal life was continuously haunted by misfortune: an uncle committed suicide in his presence, his beloved wife died prematurely, and his daughter suffered from crippling depression. Classifying words and concepts was the way in which Roget brought order to this seemingly unjust world. Consistent with Roget's own scholarly detachment, Kendall details this peculiar psychology with restraint: he sketches not the man's urge toward linguistic indulgence or pretension, but his compulsion to disseminate scientific knowledge.

The story's narrative momentum is somewhat hindered by its obvious conclusion, but word nerds who enjoyed Simon Winchester's best-selling The Professor and the Madman will find Kendall's account similarly engaging, if less eloquent. Kendall strives to revitalize the printed word (he's currently working on the bio of yet another renowned lexicographer, Noah Webster) in the face of what he perceives to be the bastardization of language through modern technologies like the Internet and text messaging. As a result, The Man Who Made Lists is as much an academic investigation as it is a biography — an entertaining history of one man's life seen through the lens of what he gave to the world.

-Chelsea Bauch