The January 2007 issue of First Things is already available, and in the “Briefly Noted” section you’ll find my review of Alexander the Corrector, a book about Alexander Cruden of Cruden’s Concordance fame. The editors at First Things snipped a few words here and there to make it fit better, generally improving the review. If you don’t subscribe to First Things you’re missing a lot of great stuff. But since we’re among friends here, I’ll let you have a peek at the longer version of my review.

Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius who Unwrote the Bible. Julia Keay. Overlook, 288 pages, $23.95

When Cruden’s Concordance was first published in 1737 in London, it was immediately recognized as a revolutionary research tool. In the American colonies, Jonathan Edwards read a magazine ad that same year for a work “more useful than any book of this kind hitherto published,” and soon had his own copy. One man had undertaken this monumental task of indexing the entire Bible, and he had done it working for a dozen years, unassisted and uncompensated. That man, Alexander Cruden, was what we might today call focused and detail oriented. We might also call him eccentric or obsessive. In his lifetime he was interred in madhouses four times, and in subsequent biographies has developed a reputation for having been mad. The rumor is an easy one to spread: after all, only a crazy person would index the whole Bible so minutely.
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