The many sexual adventures of Bill Clinton have become well-known around the globe. But who knew about the lesbian affair of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt?

Well, Richard Zacks made it his business to find out this information, along with hundreds of other sick and twisted, little-known and sometimes grotesque facts.

He brings his odd array of facts together in “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.”

Zacks covers topics across the board, with chapter titles ranging from “The Toilet Training of the Human Race” to “Odd Cases: Bestiality and the Law.”

Some of this stuff seems just too weird to be true.

Try telling children the true story of “Little Red Riding Hood.” According to Zacks, after Red is wooed into her grandma’s house by the wolf, “Little Red Riding Hood took off her clothes and climbed into bed, where she was astonished to discover what her grandmother was like without her clothes. She said to her, ‘Grandma, what big arms you have!'”

If that isn’t enough to scare them at night, just tell them if they act too weird, their madness can be treated easily enough by “taking a razor and cutting a cross in the head.”

As grotesque as this sounds, according to Zacks it’s all true. And if medieval brain surgery isn’t enough to kill a person, there’s always good ol’ guillotine-style execution. But does the poor soul really die? Nope. That’s not what Zacks believes.

Drawn from an 1880 doctor’s report, “Concludes the doctor: ‘I affirm that during two seconds [after decapitation] the brain thought.'”

None of the information in “An Underground Education” is necessary to live a full and happy life — it may even take away from one. But the redeeming quality of this book is its shock-value.

Never again will that dreaded cocktail party be without conversation.

With “An Underground Education,” Zacks has succeeded in creating every history teacher’s worst nightmare: the ugly truth of what really happened in the country’s sordid, shocking past.

Kelsey Foutch is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Waterloo.