Yeah, the author is a woman! Definitely read it! Very good. I love stuff that goes into psychological stuff. If you don't have it, you can borrow mine. It goes to the UK with DF in a week and half (he already wants to read it).
Professor and the Madman? No, I haven't heard of it!
I am also reading (I tend to do two books at a time) Who Murdered Chaucer? by Terry Jones (yes, from Monty Python and well regarded medievalist). Very academic but very interesting. And you get a bit of the dry humor in there too, which I love.
That's probably the one I've got stashed away then. I saved it from being thrown out when I worked at a bookstore. I'm pretty sure it's in a box in my mom's garage, so I'm sure I'll end up borrowing your copy instead!
The Professor and the Madman is about how the Oxford English Dictionary was first written. It's a really cool, very interesting book. It goes into great detail about how definitions were collected and sorted, and even tells about how a word was left out by mistake (bondmaid) in the first edition. A sore spot to this day
I've never heard of Who Murdered Chaucer? but I do like academic stuff from time to time. I just finished reading, not too long ago, "The Book on the Bookshelf" which is a history of bookshelves and libraries, and "The Voynich Manuscript" which is not the manuscript itself (which is interesting if only because no one has ever managed to translate it), but a book about the manuscript which was really fascinating, too.