The best kind of knowledge is uncommon knowledge. Okay so maybe you know all the stuff youre supposed to know--that 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 forty-five 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 well-rounded intellectual nothing fascinates so much as the subversive the contrarian the suppressed and the bizarre. Richard Zacks auto-didact 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 quasi-encyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art business crime science medicine sex (lots of that) and many other facets of human experience. Immensely entertaining and arguably enlightening An Underground Education is the only book that explains the birth of motion pictures using photos of naked baseball players. Richard 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.