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

This is pretty basic debunker's history/trash facts, which I love. Of course, because I love this genre, I've already encountered the majority of the information in this book elsewhere. Sadly, I was robbed of the shock one is supposed to experience when reading this genre. Although, Zacks did have a section on Nazis with facts I'd never read or even heard of before. The chapter on sex was pretty good (extensive discussion about Satan's penis throughout history). The historical sections were pretty plain. He spent an entire chapter discussing pirates and privateers, which I find boring but I'm sure others would find it very interesting. Everything else was run-of-the-mill. You've got your standard 'Oh my god, most Popes weren't holy', show more 'Oh my god, disease spread by the Europeans killed the Indians', 'Oh my god, the emancipation proclamation didn't free any slaves', 'Oh my god, lynchings were fun public events'... blah blah... it's all Lies My Teacher Told Me type information. This book gets criticized a lot for putting historical facts out of context but I disagree, that's not the problem.... it's just not very provocative. All these history debunkers need to stop pulling from the same pool of information. With all that said, it was an enjoyable read. show less

I'm a great fan of books chock full of weird facts which leads to the hassle that any chock full of weird facts book I now read will inevitably have weird facts I've already read somewhere else.

And so it is with "An Underground Education", where large swathes of the text come of no surprise to me. Of course, this is not necessarily the fault of Zacks; the book was published in 1997 so no doubt some of the material was fresher then. The book is your usual collection of odd stories and facts, backed by some strange images I hadn't seen before. And there was still enough astonishing bits of history included that was new to me (the recollections of a former New Orleans child prostitute one particularly eye-opening example) to make it worth show more the read. show less

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 "[b:Lies My Teacher Told Me|296662|Lies My Teacher Told Me Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong|James W. Loewen|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71BRY08379L._SL75_.gif|15653]" guy would probably ask to switch his airplane seat away from this guy--the marks of a truly excellent book of facts.

It is what it is: a collection of strange and/or unseemly facts (and a few not-so-facts) about the history of nearly everything. It was an entertaining and interesting read and there was quite a bit I wasn't familiar with that is great supplemental information to my other knowledge of history. But, Zacks gets 3/5 for his obsession with sexual perversion (surely there's more interesting and unknown information in history than just weird sex acts?), for his constant negative references to some vague yet ominous entity he refers to as "the Church" but whose actions were perpetrated by a great variety of different groups, for repeating several times some long-dismissed myths as if they were facts, and especially for seemingly being show more incapable of understanding the overarching movement of history in favor of piecemeal and patchwork (in other words, for lacking aptitude for abstract thought in favor of the specific and literal). Other than that it's a pretty good book... show less

The subtitle is a great description for a book full of unusual and little-known tidbits such as this: Isaac Newton's famous humble-pie quote "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" was actually written to a dwarf scientist named Robert Hooke and clearly meant as an insult.

Fun and entertaining and informative.

Some of the information is newer and stranger than others, but this book is never boring. It's great to read in small spurts, just a little trivia and history each day. I have little post it notes sticking out of mine so I can learn more about the information. Frequently, historical context is missing, but it is always informative.

(Via Goodreads)
I'd check the sources, but intriguingly fun!