The Barnes & Noble Review You're at that cocktail party when conversation flags and silence creeps in uncomfortably, and you start to wonder whether you can fit your entire head into your glass of chardonnay as a diversion. You wish that you could come up with a showstopper of a story that would not only perk up the dialogue but also elevate you to most-interesting-person-in-the-room status. Proclaiming with authority that Vanilla Ice was not a hardened street criminal as he claimed, but was actually a suburban middle-class geek is not the type of "Did you know..." anecdote that an irony-saturated '90s crowd will appreciate. Well, Richard Zacks's An Underground Education is the resource for you. It's a wonderfully wide-ranging and bizarre preemptive strike against all such uncomfortable moments and a whoopie cushion on the chairs of stodgy history professors everywhere. Subtitled, somewhat breathlessly, "The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge," An Underground Education may as well have been subtitled "Everything your parents and teachers don't know and sure as hell don't want you to know!" As he did in his first book, History Laid Bare, Zacks hoards these often deliberately well hidden nuggets of historical fact with the subversive wink of the best friend who knows about your Pez dispenser fetish. And then he presents them in a succinct and humorous fashion. Some highlights: Isaac Newton, one of science's blandest poster boys, died a proud virgin andwrotemore extensively about alchemy than the legitimate sciences. For a long time it was a sign of power and prestige to entertain guests while "on the throne." Adolph Hitler once commented that the German people "owe [their] salvation" to his being a nonsmoker. Pope Stephen VII (A.D. 896-897)