Keynote
Has the hoax now moved from the sideshow to take the center stage of American culture?
Book Title
Bunk
Subtitle
The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
Cover Image
- Finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Finalist for the 2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Winner of the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction
Body
Award-winning poet and critic Kevin Young traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American phenomenon—the legacy of P.T. Barnum's "humbug" culminating with the currency of Donald J. Trump's "fake news."Disturbingly, Young finds that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, with 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 frauds 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. This brilliant and timely work 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 contagious cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.
Bunk then turns to the hoaxing of history and the ways that forgers, plagiarists, and frauds 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. This brilliant and timely work 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 contagious cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art.
List Price
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About the Author
Credit: Melanie Dunea
Praise
- “Enthralling and essential. . . . Bunk is a sort of book that comes along rarely: the encompassing survey of some vast realm of human activity, encyclopedic but also unapologetically subjective.”—Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review
- “There’s so much to enjoy and learn from in this encyclopedic anatomy of American imposture and chicanery.”—The Washington Post
- “Wild, incisive, exhilarating. . . . Young writes with unbridled enthusiasm, a showman’s conviction, and a carny’s canny, telling a story that at times defies belief. And every word of it is true.”—Los Angeles Times
- “[A] fascinating, dense, and hyper-referential look into the strange forms and contours of our indigenous cultural b.s.”—O, The Oprah Magazine
