(Via Goodreads)
I'd check the sources, but intriguingly fun! ( )

I'm a great fan of books chock full of weird facts which leads to the hassle that any chock full of weird facts book I now read will inevitably have weird facts I've already read somewhere else.

And so it is with "An Underground Education", where large swathes of the text come of no surprise to me. Of course, this is not necessarily the fault of Zacks; the book was published in 1997 so no doubt some of the material was fresher then. The book is your usual collection of odd stories and facts, backed by some strange images I hadn't seen before. And there was still enough astonishing bits of history included that was new to me (the recollections of a former New Orleans child prostitute one particularly eye-opening example) to make it worth the read. ( )

I'd check the sources, but intriguingly fun! ( )

It is what it is: a collection of strange and/or unseemly facts (and a few not-so-facts) about the history of nearly everything. It was an entertaining and interesting read and there was quite a bit I wasn't familiar with that is great supplemental information to my other knowledge of history. But, Zacks gets 3/5 for his obsession with sexual perversion (surely there's more interesting and unknown information in history than just weird sex acts?), for his constant negative references to some vague yet ominous entity he refers to as "the Church" but whose actions were perpetrated by a great variety of different groups, for repeating several times some long-dismissed myths as if they were facts, and especially for seemingly being incapable of understanding the overarching movement of history in favor of piecemeal and patchwork (in other words, for lacking aptitude for abstract thought in favor of the specific and literal). Other than that it's a pretty good book... ( )

Let me tell you: the first story I told out of this book, about the KKK originally being a pyramid scheme to bilk racists out of their $$$ while also cleverly holding major interests in custom white sheet manufacturers, was flatly disbelieved by a bunch of the most revisionist-beliefy people. The "[b:Lies My Teacher Told Me|296662|Lies My Teacher Told Me Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong|James W. Loewen|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/71BRY08379L._SL75_.gif|15653]" guy would probably ask to switch his airplane seat away from this guy--the marks of a truly excellent book of facts. ( )