An Underground Education, Richard Zacks
An Underground Education, Richard Zacks
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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 Human Knowledge

Author: Richard Zacks

Narrator: Timothy Andrés Pabon

Unabridged: 17 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/11/2020

Categories: Nonfiction, Reference


Synopsis

Okay, so maybe you know all the stuff you're supposed to know. 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 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 quasi-encyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art, business, crime, science, medicine, sex (lots of that), and many other facets of human experience.


About Richard Zacks

Richard Zacks is a graduate of the University of Michigan and Columbia Journalism School. He is the author of History Laid Bare and An Underground Education and has written articles for The Atlantic, Time, The Village Voice, and many other publications. He also thinks he knows where Captain Kidd's last ship went down.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Arthur

Just how many foreskins could Jesus have possibly had? Inquiring minds want to know.......more

Goodreads review by Raven

This book is filled with all the dirty laundry that never gets aired in the history of our ignoble species. Did you know the pope once endorsed a cocaine-laced wine? Just say no, man. A donkey was once charged with seducing a man into sexual congress, don't worry, she got off. --Oh, that was bad. Alr......more

Goodreads review by lola

Let me tell you: the first story I told out of this book, about the KKK originally being a pyramid scheme to bilk racists out of their $$$ while also cleverly holding major interests in custom white sheet manufacturers, was flatly disbelieved by a bunch of the most revisionist-beliefy people. The "L......more