DISCOVERIES

Schott’s Original

Miscellany

Ben Schott

Bloomsbury: 144 pp., $14.95

This book comes wrapped in a red band that bears a quote from Oscar Wilde: “It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.” Why then, does this small volume seemingly contain more useful information than any search engine or encyclopedia? For example, Internet domain codes for various countries, a list of constitutional amendments, what the four horsemen of the apocalypse stand for, useful words for word games (like “raj”), eponymous words (like “Bowdlerize, from Thomas Bowdler, 1754-1825) and names for various kinds of murder, from fratricide to vaticide (prophet murder).

It is so pleasant just to have this book near, as though at any moment one could pretend to be deeply involved in some scholarly pursuit of meaning.

“Painstaking efforts have been made to ensure that all the information ... is correct,” the author assures us. But he accepts no responsibility if you “play a losing hand in poker; fail to be granted Executive Clemency; get lost on Hollywood Boulevard; order a disagreeable kind of sushi; shrink all of your socks; or say something utterly come-hither in Swedish.”

*

Am I a Woman?

A Skeptic’s Guide

to Gender

Cynthia Eller

Beacon Press: 144 pp., $24

RAISED in the ‘60s, Cynthia Eller thought she might become the first woman president. She has not. Nor did she become a suburban housewife with five children. She fell, she explains, somewhere in between with a full-time job and two children. She can do all the right gender tricks (“I just flip the switch, and I’m, like, totally a Valley Girl,” and yet she cannot keep track of everyone’s birthday and send appropriate cards), but is she really a woman? Sexually, physiologically, yes, without a doubt, she tells us. But gender-wise? “Maybe I was a self-important, overbearing, hard-hearted woman, but if you were willing to look at me from a different angle, why I was a real go-getter of a guy.”

This sounds lighthearted, but this full-fledged academic in gender studies is thinking aloud. In the end, she admits, “femaleness is in the eye of the beholder.”

It’s a whimper of a conclusion, but it follows a thought process so unconventional the conclusion hardly matters. The question is, how willing are you to flout rules and risk being called “bag ladies. Or nutjobs. Once you’re in one of these categories,” Eller says, “what you do won’t change anyone’s idea of what female behavior consists of, since you’re no longer counted as a normal woman.”

Why should this matter? Because, Eller writes, only 14% of Congress is female; few among the Fortune 500 CEOS are women; a woman’s right to an abortion is still under attack and 683,000 rapes occur each year in the United States.

*

The Man Who

Found Time

James Hutton and the

Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity

Jack Repcheck

Perseus Publishing: 229 pp., $26

COPERNICUS, Galileo, Darwin ... Hutton? The first three, writes Jack Repcheck, are “key figures in the freeing of science from the straight jacket of religious orthodoxy. But James Hutton must be counted among them.”

Hutton was a lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, a natural philosopher and a geologist. In 1785, he delivered a series of lectures in Edinburgh, arguing that the geologic record could prove the Earth was millions, even billions of years old. This questioned the Bible (which placed the creation, religious scholars reckoned, on Oct. 23, 4004 BC.) and meant humans weren’t around at the beginning of time (or even on the sixth day).

The biography is a refreshing look at the importance of his ideas to future paradigm-shifting scholars such as geologist Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin. Repchek relies on Hutton’s friendships and environment to recreate the evolution of his ideas and to carry them beyond Hutton’s death to the current estimation of the Earth’s age: 4.55 billion years.