Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
By Kevin Young
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction
“There Kevin Young goes again, giving us books we greatly need, cleverly disguised as books we merely want. Unexpectedly essential.”—Marlon James
Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young tours us through a rogue’s gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakers—from the humbug of P. T. Barnum and Edgar Allan Poe to the unrepentant bunk of JT LeRoy and Donald J. Trump. Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, race being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum came to fame by displaying figures like Joice Heth, a black woman whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and What Is It?, an African American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution.
Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the deadly imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of James Frey to the identity theft of Rachel Dolezal. In this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what it means to live in a post-factual world of “truthiness” where everything is up for interpretation and everyone is subject to a pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.
Kevin Young
Kevin Young is the author of six books of poetry, most recently For the Confederate Dead, winner of the Quill Award in Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement. He is also the author of Dear Darkness and Jelly Roll, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. He is the editor of four other volumes, including Everyman Pocket Poets Blues Poems and Jazz Poems, and the Library of America's John Berryman: Selected Poems. He is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.
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Reviews for Bunk
32 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Could not stick with this book; too many asides or repetitive points to keep my interest. Only made it through the first two chapters before abandoning.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As much as I hate the implications of this book, I loved the book itself. Young has brought me face to face with the racism that is part of the air we breathe in America, just as it most likely is everywhere. His book is filled with fascinating historical examples of "untruths" that some of us manage to perpetrate on others. His research is impeccable.
Perhaps because he is a poet, I sometimes had to strain to catch the connections he was making. Sometimes I found them difficult to follow. I don't think racism itself is usually the overt intent of people who commit these acts. Sometimes these people are psychopaths who are merely out to game the system; sometimes they are mentally ill. But the fact remains, their "bunk" could not succeed if the wider society were not racist.
He made me think and see things in a different way. I will be more conscious of my own reactions and thoughts due to this book. That is no small accomplishment for a writer to achieve. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A review of hoaxes in the media, and the popularity of carnival shows, back to the 19th century. Largely literary sources, as opposed to other historical material. The American hope to learnng or see something new, exiting and inspiring and to feel shame and indignation blended with admiration for a clever con when cheated. That thing that Fritz Freling & Mel Blanc satirized when Yosemite Sam demanded Fearless Freep and the high diving act in the classic Loony Tune animation High Diving Hare.Long and earnest.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kevin Young is the poetry editor of the New Yorker, and if you didn't already know that, you'd guess immediately from the style--the book reads like a 500 page New Yorker article, or perhaps collection of articles. The title fairly accurately summarizes the contents, which dip into the lengthy history of America's (and to some extent the world's) complicated relationship with the notion of truth, from P.T. Barnum to "fake news."He's particularly interested in the role of race--from how the black body became an object for public display, stripping them of their humanity, and how our views on race have shaped and enabled hucksters' ability to defraud the public.
Young's background is in literary criticism, and his analysis skews somewhat towards that, rather than to a strictly historical accounting. It's a fascinating read, but not necessarily a purely pleasurable one. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Loved this book, it's amazing what people believed, and I suppose in 100 years readers will be saying the same about our era of online hoaxes. The old hoaxes were more fun to read about, I guess since I'm tired of living thru the Trump hoax the new stuff just want as appealing to read about.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A fascinating and timely book that functions simultaenously as an entertaining history of American hoaxes, an academic examination of the meaning of hoaxes and plagiarism, and a personal account of how the narratives that drive them have affected the author and black Americans in general. In a sense, "Bunk" is entertaining for the same reason that Lawrence Wright's "Going Clear" is: the stories of American "humbugs" from P.T. Barnum to Donald Trump are astonishingly, endlessly strange and entertaining. And most of these stories are complex and bizarre enough to be worth revisiting in full: one comes off amazed at how complicated some hoaxes can be (they almost always involve more than one person) and how easy it can be to get people to fall for a likely story. But the author's also very good at highlighting what connects these stories through the years. The book functions as sort of a history of the development of the American hoax and how it's changed: while old-time carnival owners sought to amaze their audiences, modern hoaxers tend to want to horrify them. He digs into the political implications of hoaxes, which is something most people who write on scandal don't, as most reporting doesn't tend to go too far beyond psychological speculation about the person who perpetrated the hoax. He's got a very good eye -- and a deep understanding -- of the various ironies and contradictions that most hoaxes involve. Young's other focus is race, and he argues that race is usually an essential component of American hoaxes. Honestly, it's sometimes difficult to tell whether Young wanted to write a book about the history of race in America or about notable American deceptions. While this gives the book a welcome personal tone -- as young tells us that he personally has experienced many of the strange situations in which both hoaxers and their marks have found themselves in -- some of this book's readers may feel that he's stretching his arguments a bit too thin and perhaps losing his focus. The book also loses some points for being a bit too long, and not as tightly organized as it could have been. Even so, even while providing an entertaining history of notable frauds, the author never loses sight of the damage that these frauds do. He argues that they not only hurt the people that are fooled, and the artists whose work is lifted, they also do injury to the truth and to our ability to relate to each other honestly. At a time when a lot of people seem to take it for granted that we live in a "post-truth" era where facts simply don't matter, this is an important reminder that ferreting out pernicious falsehoods is still a worthwhile endeavor. Recommended as a survival guide for our times.