An Underground Education

Richard Zacks' An Underground Education (subtitle: The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human) is a grab bag of historical facts and anecdotes that read like a News of the Weird from decades and centuries past. They read like urban legends you've never of heard of, but are in fact, true.

For instance, Lord Byron kept envelopes of his many girlfriends' pubic hair trimmings. When Madame Curie was accused of adultery, her friend Albert Einstein help her beat the charges by pointing out that "She is not attractive enough to become dangerous for anyone." And the powerful merchant banker family, the Medicis "kept a fully stocked dwarf house mansion as a sort of human dollhouse."

Some of the anecdotes are a few pages long; most range between a half page and one page -- they all are examples of the wonderfully weird world we live in. Prepare to have your mind blown. Link