'Jeopardy!' champ shares trivia

BRAINIAC: ADVENTURES IN THE CURIOUS, COMPETITIVE, COMPULSIVE WORLD OF TRIVIA BUFFS, by Ken Jennings, Villard, 269 pages, $24.95

Ken Jennings, the greatest champion in "Jeopardy!" history, has brushed up on his knowledge of trivia (if you believe he had to), to write "Brainiac," an engaging book about the alleged discipline of trivia. (A collection of useless facts?)

Between each of his book's 16 chapters, Jennings includes choice pieces of trivia (170 of them), the way they might be detailed on television, i.e., "William Henry Harrison, the ninth U.S. president, lasted only 30 days in office" or "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets was the original theme song to "Happy Days" or the Wizard of Oz's full name is Oscar Zoraster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs (the initials spell out "O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.").

Jennings claims that when he auditioned for "Jeopardy!" he expected his 6-foot, 9-inch college buddy Earl Cahill to make the show while he was eliminated — but as history records, Earl lost.

Often weaving his personal life into this treatise on trivia, Jennings proves himself a capable writer. (He was first and foremost an English major, after all.)

His chapters are organized to fit the history of trivia, but using the "Jeopardy!" lexicon ("who is, what is," meaning that on the game show, the central gimmick is that questions and answers are "syntactically reversed."). Ending each chapter heading with "tion," he cleverly discusses trivia beginning with "Ambition," leaping to "Competition," as well as "Cognition," "Juxtaposition" and "Repetition," and climaxing with "Redefinition."

Jennings notes that women have always entered trivia contests in smaller numbers than men, then asserts that everyone who has studied it has a different reason for doing so. His suspicion is that fewer women participate due to "trivia anxiety" — "not because they are less able to store trivia in their brains."

As he traces its history, Jennings concludes that trivia "as we know it today is purely a 20th century invention — except its roots go back a little further." Jennings found that books resembling trivia collections began appearing in Shakespeare's time.

By the 19th century, such titles as "Things Not Generally Known: A Popular Hand-Book of Facts Not Readily Accessible in Literature, History and Science" had become prolific and popular.