BRIEFLY NOTED

The Einstein of Sex, by Daniel Brook (Norton). In 1896, the Berlin-based Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld published a pamphlet with the startling thesis that sexual orientation is inborn and exists on a continuum.

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As Brook shows in this elegant, timely biography, the pamphlet caused a sensation, as did Hirschfeld’s later works on the “relativity” of gender and the social construction of race. If Hirschfeld’s pioneering research remains understudied today, the reason, Brook forcefully argues, isn’t simply that the Nazis burned his books and medical files (in which various Nazi leaders appeared); it’s that contemporaries who had once been allies, including Sigmund Freud, “went silent on him,” fearing that their own causes would be discredited by association.