An Underground Education: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Filds of h - Hardcover

Zacks, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385479948 ISBN 13: 9780385479943

Publisher: Doubleday, 1997

Synopsis

A compendium of odd facts, stories, photographs, and images includes such tidbits as the fact that Pope Leo XIII advertised cocaine-laced wine in the 1880s

About this title

From the Author:

Author's Pep Talk
I confess. I wrote the book. I spent two years studying hermaphrodites, eunuchs, women who breast-feed puppies, masturbation accidents, popes who make JFK look faithful, and other important under-studied topics. I am also proud to announce that about a third of the book has something to do with sex. And the other two-thirds packs all kinds of strange stories, from the ugly origins of Great American fortunes to Thomas Edison feuding with George Westinghouse over building the first electric chair.

If you get a chance, check out my web site But be sure to buy the book from Amazon.com.

I hope you enjoy. Don't miss the 200 pictures.

From the Inside Flap:

d of knowledge is uncommon knowledge.

Okay, so maybe you know all the stuff you're 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 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 contrar

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0385479948
• ISBN 13: 9780385479943
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 415