In History Laid Bare (463 pages. HarperCollins. $20), Richard Zacks (not a pun) exposes “love, sex and perversity from the ancient Etruscans to Warren G. Harding.” Excerpted sources range from a Hittite law tablet (1400 B.C.) that proscribes bestiality-except with horses or mules-to a series of letters in which author Lewis Carroll unsuccessfully attempts to wheedle permission to photograph an acquaintance’s three young daughters in the nude. Tasty anecdotes abound. When the British first pulled into Tahiti in 1767, sailors found that local women would make themselves available in return for hardware-an arrangement that eventually stripped the ship of cleats and left two thirds of the crew sleeping on deck “for want of nails to hang their hammocks,” the ship’s master wrote. There’s plenty more the teacher skipped, including a bit of performance art co-starring Byzantine Empress Theodora and a live goose; Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s avowed predilection for spankings; a coital competition sponsored by Pope Alexander VI; eyewitness descriptions of the Devil’s phallus (“as long as some kitchen utensils”), and a dirty joke scribbled in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook. Here’s hoping that historians will start putting a little more lead in their pencils.
