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

Richard Zacks

Feb 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Timothy Andrés Pabon

About this audiobook

Okay, so maybe you know all the stuff you're supposed to know. 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 contrarian, the suppressed, and the bizarre. Richard Zacks 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 quasi-encyclopedia that provides alternative takes on art, business, crime, science, medicine, sex (lots of that), and many other facets of human experience.

About the author

Richard Zacks is the bestselling author of numerous books, including Chasing the Last Laugh, Island of Vice, and An Underground Education. His writing has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, and many other publications.

Timothy Andres Pabon is an actor and Spanish and English voice-over artist/audiobook narrator from Washington DC. He has recorded over 140 books, one of which was nominated for a 2015 Society of Voice Arts and Sciences Award and another which received an AudioFile Earphones Award as part of an ensemble cast in 2014.