NEW paperback

An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields [Paperback] Zacks, Richard

The best kind of knowledge is uncommon knowledgeOkay, so maybe you know all the stuff youre supposed to knowthat 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 fortyfive minutes examining the hosts bookshelves?Wouldnt 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 wellrounded intellectual, nothing fascinates so much as the subversive, the contrarian, the suppressed, and the bizarre Richard Zacks, autodidact 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 quasiencyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art, business, crime, science, medicine, sex lots of that, and many other facets of human experienceImmensely entertaining, and arguably enlightening, An Underground Education is the only book that explains the birth of motion pictures using photos of naked baseball playersRichard 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 Harpers 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 email at rzacks@echonyccom