Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News
This nonfiction work traces the history of hoaxes and fraud in American culture, from sideshows and plagiarism to fabricated memoirs and fake news. Rather than merely mocking falsehood, it examines how fakery binds itself to race, power, and the desire to believe.
Work Information
To follow the history of fakery is also to ask what a society wants to believe is real.
A work of cultural criticism ranging from P. T. Barnum to contemporary false news, the book surveys American fraud and credibility. Kevin Young treats fabrication not as anecdote alone but as a technology of power that decides how people are displayed, believed, and doubted. No Japanese book edition was confirmed, so the Japanese identifiers are null.
Review Summaries
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The book combines encyclopedic reach with critical energy, showing how fraud as entertainment enters politics and racial representation. Some readers may find the density demanding, but the urgency of the subject comes through strongly.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Graywolf Pr
- Published
- 2017-11-14
- Pages
- 560 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.26 x 4.14 x 23.88 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781555977917
- ISBN-10
- 155597791X
- Price
- 6424 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/History/Americas/United States/20th Century
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 rogues gallery of hoaxers, plagiarists, forgers, and fakersfrom 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 is the author of a previous book of nonfiction, The Grey Album , and eleven books of poetry, including Blue Laws , which was long-listed for the National Book Award. He is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
Reviews
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Brother loved this book. He read about this somewhere and wanted it for Christmas. Very excited to read it.
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I wanted to read this book. It's a topic I find both interesting and fun. But this is not a book for information and/or entertainment. It's a thesis born of academia. Endless quotes, excessively long sentences, and squllions of added words that do nothing other than over complicate and reduce readability. Had Mr Young engaged an editor, and which I suspect would have cropped a third away, then this could have been a good book. I got through 10%, and skimmed the rest, but I just couldn't get further. I felt like I was being punished. Hey ho.
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This book reads as a very formal academic treatise. Hoaxes and the like need to be subjects that seriously interest you, to warrant purchasing. For a student or academic, or someone who works in media or politics, I expect it would be fine. It is way too dry and heavyweight for a casual reader such as myself, even with a previous interest in the topic. The research and attention to detail is excellent, the style overwhelming.
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I have only read about 10% so far. Quite please with the content and writing up to this point.
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Interesting read and I would certainly recommend it. My only issues are that I wish we were given more background on the various hoaxes Mr. Young talks about. It seems as though at times he is slightly tone deaf to his audience, or that audience must he a very specific group with a very specific, almost niche, knowledge base.(or a clever method of hoarding us into buying what he is selling, banking on the fact that most of us won't go and do our own research on these various hoaxes, so we haven't choice but to believe him at his word.) I found his analysis of the hoax and its application in current events compelling for the most part but then he slips into what I considered to be a rather preachy, beating his opinions over the reader's head. I found some of his conclusions to be a hit of a stretch. Taking these leaps of faith with him us exhaustIng after a while which as a result diminishes my desire yo buy his analysis. The book is well researched, I just felt like Mr. Young is very impressed with himself and his knowledge/intellect/analytical prowess that I just wanted him to come back to Earth and stop trying to impress us. We bought your book guy, its cool, we get it, you are smart. But, give it a whirl. It's a fascinating analysis of how far we ve not gone.