The best kind of knowledge is uncommon knowledge.
Okay, so maybe you know all the stuff you're supposed to know--that there are teenier things than atoms, that Remembrance of Things Past has something to do with a perfumed cookie, that the Monroe Doctrine means we get to take over small South American countries when we feel like it. But really, is this kind of knowledge going to make you the hit of the cocktail party, or the loser spending forty-five minutes examining the host's bookshelves?
Wouldn't you rather learn things like how the invention of the bicycle affected the evolution of underwear? Or that the 1949 Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to a doctor who performed lobotomies with a household ice pick? Or how Catherine the Great really died? Or that heroin was sold over the counter not too long ago?
For the truly well-rounded "intellectual," nothing fascinates so much as the subversive, the contrarian, the suppressed, and the bizarre. Richard Zacks, auto-didact extraordinaire, has unloosed his admittedly strange mind and astonishing research abilities upon the entire spectrum of human knowledge, ferreting out endlessly fascinating facts, stories, photos, and images guaranteed to make you laugh, gasp in wonder, and occasionally shudder at the depths of human depravity. The result of his labors is this fantastically illustrated quasi-encyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art, business, crime, science, medicine, sex (lots of that), and many other facets of human experience.
Immensely entertaining, and arguably enlightening, An Underground Education is the only book that explains the birth of motion pictures using photos of naked baseball players.
Richard Zacks is the author of History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Ancient Etruscans to Warren G. Harding, which was excerpted in classy magazines like Harper's and earned the attention of the even classier New York Times, which noted that "Zacks specializes in the raunchy and perverse." The Georgia State Legislature voted on whether to ban the book from public libraries. He has studied Arabic, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Hebrew, and received the Phillips Classical Greek Award at the University of Michigan. He has also told his publisher that he made a living in Cairo cheating royalty from a certain Arab country at games of chance, although the claim remains unverified. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Time, Life, Sports Illustrated, The Village Voice, TV Guide, and similarly diverse publications. Zacks is married and busy warping the minds of his two children, Georgia and Ziegfield. He resides in New York City, and can be reached via e-mail at rzacks@echonyc.com.
From the Hardcover edition.
An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew about Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of knowledge FROM OUR EDITORS The Barnes & Noble Review
You're at that cocktail party when conversation flags and silence creeps in uncomfortably, and you start to wonder whether you can fit your entire head into your glass of chardonnay as a diversion. You wish that you could come up with a showstopper of a story that would not only perk up the dialogue but also elevate you to most-interesting-person-in-the-room status. Proclaiming with authority that Vanilla Ice was not a hardened street criminal as he claimed, but was actually a suburban middle-class geek is not the type of "Did you know..." anecdote that an irony-saturated '90s crowd will appreciate. Well, Richard Zacks's An Underground Education is the resource for you. It's a wonderfully wide-ranging and bizarre preemptive strike against all such uncomfortable moments and a whoopie cushion on the chairs of stodgy history professors everywhere. Subtitled, somewhat breathlessly, "The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge," An Underground Education may as well have been subtitled "Everything your parents and teachers don't know and sure as hell don't want you to know!" As he did in his first book, History Laid Bare, Zacks hoards these often deliberately well hidden nuggets of historical fact with the subversive wink of the best friend who knows about your Pez dispenser fetish. And then he presents them in a succinct and humorous fashion. Some highlights: Isaac Newton, one of science's blandest poster boys, died a proud virgin andwrotemore extensively about alchemy than the legitimate sciences. For a long time it was a sign of power and prestige to entertain guests while "on the throne." Adolph Hitler once commented that the German people "owe [their] salvation" to his being a nonsmoker. Pope Stephen VII (A.D. 896-897) was so angry with his dead predecessor (Pope Formosus) that a year after Formosus's interment, he had the corpse dug up, dressed in papal garb, and put on trial — then he found it guilty and cut off its fingers. The oldest version of the Cinderella tale dates back 2,500 years to Egypt and involves a prostitute whose sandal was stolen by an eagle and given to the pharaoh, who then searched for the owner. In addition to his forays into the shadow histories of literature, business, crime, medicine, religion, and world history, Zacks digs into the sexual realm — that dirty closet of all polite societies — and unearths quite a few eyebrow-raisers. For example, throughout most of history and in most cultures, much effort was given to minimizing breast size, the American fascination with large breasts being a recent and anomalous development. A great irony of female fashion is that until the 20th century, though women wore many layers of clothing and kept their legs completely covered, underwear was pretty much unheard of. And one of the real kickers of male-female relations is a twist on one of the greatest sexual clichés of all time: Up through the late 1700s, it was believed that a woman could not conceive unless she had an orgasm. Think about it. Zacks takes obvious delight in debunking parts of our candy-coated history and exposing the shallowness of our collective memory, but he also pinpoints a number of legends that turn out to have been true. The best example is that Coca-Cola did in fact contain cocaine, from its inception in 1886 until 1903. Of course, cocaine wasn't illegal then. Go figure. Though there are a lot of second- and third-hand sources, this does not take away from the entertainment value of this very strange, very amusing book. If even one-tenth of these stories are true, our accepted history is more than simply selective — it's opportunistic, foolishly rose-tinted, and grossly misleading. All in all, there are two highly specific places where readers would be most receptive to this book, places where some of the most intense and open-minded thinking is often done: the college dorm and the bathroom. —Jay A. Fernandez
FROM THE PUBLISHER A fabulous compendium of alternative takes on nearly every aspect of human experience. 200 photos and illustrations throughout. National reviews.
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