An Underground Education (Hardcover)

by Richard Zacks (Author) "The children are safely tucked in bed; a light breeze blows in through the window; Mom hushes them and begins to tell a sweet tale..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, United States, Middle Ages (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Forget the history you were taught in school; Richard Zacks's version is crueler and funnier than anything you might have learned in seventh-grade civics--and much more of a gross-out, too. Described on the book jacket as an "autodidact extraordinaire," Zacks is also the author of History Laid Bare, making him something of an expert guide through history's back alleys and side streets. There's no fact too seamy or perverse for Zacks to drag out into the light of day, from matters scatological and sexual to some of history's most truly bizarre episodes. Curious about ancient nose-blowing etiquette? What about the sexual proclivities of Catherine the Great? Throughout chapters such as "The Evolution of Underwear" and "Dentistry Before Novocaine," Zacks proves a tireless debunker of popular myths as well as a muckraker par excellence.

Review
Astonishing facts!

Bizarre photographs!

Fascinating & sometimes deeply weird true stories!

Just a small taste of the intellectual smorgasbord contained in this volume.

Did you know:

that in the original story of Goldilocks the bears torture and kill their impolite visitor?
that Pope Leo XIII appeared in an advertisement for cocaine-laced wine in the 1880s?
that people didn't eat with forks until the 1700s?
that Sir 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?
that Thomas Edison secretly helped develop the electric chair in a scheme to have the lethal machine named after his arch-rival, George Westinghouse?
that the first pediatric guide written in the United States recommended that expectant mothers breastfeed puppies?
that for two centuries French scientists obsessively experimented on freshly decapitated heads in an effort to discover whether the bodiless brain still functioned?
that Cleopatra was ugly as sin? -- Review

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (November 10, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385479948
• ISBN-13: 978-0385479943
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #742,826 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An Underground Education (Zacks), January 21, 2004

By	Charles Tatum (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 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 (Paperback)

You must think you are the cat's patoot, so sure you know everything. You paid attention in class, got good grades, and everything Mr. or Mrs. Insert Teacher's Name Here said was true because they had a college degree and the bravery to stand in front of a bunch of slack jawed kids and try to teach them something. Well, have I got the book for you.

Richard Zacks explodes our often mythic look at the world. This is not just another "your teacher lied to you in school" book. Zacks backs up his own history with actual primary source documentation. As he writes, "I started muttering, 'You can't make this stuff up!'."

Zacks has divided the book into ten different sections: Arts & Literature, Business, Crime & Punishment, Everyday Life, Medicine, Religion, Science, Sex, World History, and American History. While each section can be read separately, it may be hard to put down the book after just one helping. Zacks covers a wide range of topics, but always keeps his writing simple and unpedestrian. You quickly realize that all of these icons in history were actually people just like you and me. Mata Hari was no genius spy, her mug shot taken before her execution shows a plain woman in her early forties.

William Shakespeare used to write down to his common audiences, letting loose with filthy puns lost on today's students. Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin, two of America's greatest humorists, both worked blue, writing material that you will not see in copies of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" or "Poor Richard's Almanack." You think Iraqi war profiteering is something new? Pity the poor soldiers of the Civil War, eating rancid meat and trying to fight with ancient weaponry all sold to the United States government by greedy business tycoons.

Speaking of the Civil War, did you know that almost a million slaves held in the Union states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri were not freed until AFTER their enslaved brothers to the south? Thank the thirteenth amendment, since the Emancipation Proclamation only dealt with slaves in the Confederacy.

The material covered is immense, from the race to build the first electric chair to the world's first indoor toilet. Hermaphrodites, bestiality, and a pope pushing cocaine laced wine, oh my!

Zacks litters his text with photos, but they add to the prose. He lets his opinions be known often, from his outrage over the lynchings of the early twentieth century, to defending Amerigo Vespucci in light of criticism by others. Christopher Columbus does not get off as easily. He highlights the common as well as royal historical figures

"An Underground Education" is a very good read. Once in a while, Zacks makes his point early, and a couple of vignettes run a little long (especially privateers in the Revolutionary War, and some of the business anecdotes), but the things you discover will outweigh any boredom you feel. If education is the key to success, then Zacks takes that key and breaks it off in the lock.

79 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Reference book molded into a story, July 31, 2000

By	twisesq - See all my reviews

This review is from: 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 (Paperback)

There is a genre of books which I refer to as "debunking books" - books which debunk popular knowledge. All of the books in that category generally contain the same information, because all of the authors have used the same sources (of which the number is limited due to the purging of these sources by the passage of time). Zacks' "An Underground Education" is similar to the others in the genre, and in fact credits many of the other books as sources of his research. If you've read one of these books, you've pretty much read them all, and you can skip this book. There just isn't that much new debunking information out there to serve up in a new book.

However, this book does do something that the others don't as well: Present the knowledge in an easy(ier) to read format. Many of these books operate like an encyclopedia of misinformation, but Zacks has reformatted the text into an easy to read, chapter-by-chapter story. The information seems to flow in a loosly-organized fashion, which allows the book to be read cover-to-cover without seeming like one is reading an encyclopedia.

If you are really interested in debunking popular culture, this is one of the better books in that genre, due to the format the author employs. If you've read one or two of those "debunking" books already, skip this one - it's largely the same information you've read before.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Average At Best, March 13, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: 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 (Paperback)

An Underground Education has an admirable premise: fill us in on, or disabuse the reader of, various myths, misconceptions, suppressed facts, the "Arcana Mundi." And indeed, Richard Zachs does this with some skill, energy and wit. However, the information contained in the book, despite being divided by topics such as politics, art, and of course, sex, is too brief: By trying to touch on just about everything under the sun (or should I write, hiding in the shadows?) in the less-pristine history of humanity, the author falls prey to his own dislike of ignorance, dogmatic teaching, and general ineptness among supposed scholars and luminaries.

For example, in his discussion of the long-toed shoes, or poulaines, which he rightly places after his juicily giddy discussion of codpieces, he fails to explore the equally juicy history of the poulaines; European folk beliefs equated foot-fize with penis-size (think also of noses...) and the tips of the poulaines were thus phallic symbols. The tops of poulaines were also often painted with images of male genitals.

The author also fails completely to discuss (was he even aware) the female-analogue of the codpiece: the merkin, or a wig for the pubes...One has to dig for this sort of information. To look at the bibliography, the author consults with, at most, two or three sources when writing his entries. In effect, he has done little of his own research, despite crowing about his own linguistic abilities. Ovid's Ars Amatoria surely belongs somewhere in this book; sadly, Latin is not listed as one of the author's mastered languages. There are good translations, to be sure.

Another example: Mr. Zachs labors to tell us about Joan of Arc's clothing, and correctly points out the her then-crime of wearing men's clothing; and also that she died at the hands (or whims?) of France and the Holy Catholic Church. However, he fails to strip away the saviour/warrior myths of St. Joan. She was an extraordinary young woman in many ways, but she was not at all like the statuesque Milla Jovovich hacking her way through the enemies of France. Mr. Zachs simply has not bothered, in several instances, to question his own assumptions and erroneous teachings, and this harms an otherwise entertaining and at times biting social commentary.

Other nit-picking: Either his editor was asleep, or Mr. Zachs himself missed the boat again and again when going over the galleys before the final printing: weird punctuation, odd word-choice and usage, fanciful grammer. This could have been a much better book, had he narrowed his scope, looked more deeply into his subjects, and learned how to punctuate.