Simon Winchester is fascinated by eccentric intellectuals who contribute wonderful things to our world, whether dictionaries (as in The Professor and the Madman) or in the case of The Man Who Loved China, a thorough analysis of China's Science and Civilization. Winchester makes connections between the personal character and the obsessive projects these intellectual heroes pursued.

Joseph Needham was undoubtedly a polymath skilled in biology and many other subjects but it took an affair with a young Chinese scholar to focus his attention on China. His wife Dorothy was fully aware of this relationship and seems supportive even in 1930's. Before mastering the highly complex language Needham signed his first love letter to his paramour with Chinese character. From then on he didn't look back and end up writing a multivolume dictionary on Chinese Science and Civilization.

Joseph lived a roller coaster ride between fame and ridicule due to his attractions not only to a variety of women but to radical socialism, eccentric dancing, liberal Anglicanism, and nudism. At his nadir he was conned by the Chinese in 1952 to support a false thesis that American's were using biochemical warfare in Korea. Were he an American he would have been blacklisted but as a British academic he was shunned by his colleagues and ridiculed in the press. His fortunes and reputation were retrieved when his first volumes of the encyclopedia were publish.

The Project was however too great for any one man, or any one life span, it was left to others to finish. In the meantime he became the Master of his College and after the death of his wife Dorothy, he married his 84 year old mistress at the age of 94.

The only flaw I could fault Winchester's book was with is his penchant for detail especially in the finer aspects of scientific discovery, too many inventions with little structural linkage to the other aspects of the book made the reading rather dull in sections. I am however glad that I persisted because the second half of the book dealing with Joseph Needham's legacy and eccentricities was engaging. It led me to have more appreciation for the culture and discoveries of China and for thinkers who are unafraid to follow their interests, regardless of public reactions.