“An Underground Education”

by Richard Zacks

FOUR STARS

After two semesters of tried and true, pre-approved lit that reinforces the status quo, Richard Zacks’s “An Underground Education” makes for a delightful summertime diversion.

This book has all the charm of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” while maintaining a certain air of legitimacy throughout.

Zacks has collected tales of the strange but true in this volume that bears the subheading “the unauthorized and outrageous supplement to everything you thought you knew about art, sex, business, crime, science, medicine and other fields of human knowledge.”

The book gives a revealing look into the dirty little secrets of American and world history, and it offers a bizarre look into invention, innovation and popular misconceptions. It is serious scholarship written with a smirk.

Some of the foibles, secrets and peccadillos the book reveals include Abraham Lincoln’s porno-by-mail fetish, Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child, George Washington’s inability to father children and Eleanor Roosevelt’s love of the ladies.

There are factoids about ill-conceived, as well as brilliant, medical experiments, early gynecological breakthroughs, nose jobs of the ancient world and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

The tome delves into little-known literary trivia such as Shakespeare’s dirty puns, the lost love letters of James Joyce, Mark Twain’s defense of small penises and the overlooked naughty bits of the Bible.

Not to mention the use of cocaine and opium in everything from Coca-Cola to cough drops. The toiletry habits of the Western world. Body-snatching, witch trials and who scalped who first. Ben Franklin’s fart experiment. The profit motive behind the Inquisition. And much, much more.

The book makes for an interesting read. One has only to leaf through the pages to find facts of interest ranging from the trivial to the profound.

According to the author himself, “knowledge does not have to be serious,” and Zacks makes every attempt to entertain as well as educate.

His manners are irreverent and often vulgar, which helps to highlight his main thesis. It’s that the history of the world IS irreverent and vulgar, so why treat it with dry civility?

This is the good stuff sifted roughly from the pre-approved texts.

It puts one in mind of those occasional sidetracks in history classes taught by rebellious profs who love to blow your mind with sidetrips through the sordid past. This book is 100 percent humorous footnotes.