Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News

by Kevin Young

Has the hoax now moved from the sideshow to take the center stage of American culture?

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. 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Psychology, Sociology, Politics, Audiobook, American History

560 pages, Hardcover

First published November 14, 2017

About the author

Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author of Most Way Home, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; Blues Poems; Jazz Poems and John Berryman's Selected Poems.

His Black Cat Blues, originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Best American Poetry 2005. Young's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. In 2007, he served as guest editor for an issue of Ploughshares. He has written on art and artists for museums in Los Angeles and Minneapolis.

His 2003 book of poems Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award.

After stints at the University of Georgia and Indiana University, Young now teaches writing at Emory University, where he is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, a large collection of first and rare editions of poetry in English.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review for the Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...

Most people probably know that the word “bunk” is short for “bunkum,” meaning insincere talk, claptrap or humbug. Fewer people are likely familiar with the word’s etymology, coined out of racial unrest in 1820 in relation to the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri as a slave state. That year, on the floor of the 16th Congress, even though an immediate vote had been called, North Carolina Rep. Felix Walker insisted on filibustering in favor of Missouri’s slave state status in the name of Buncombe, his home county.

If there’s bunk around, then it probably needs debunking, and Kevin Young does the job admirably in “Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.” Drawing on incidents and etymologies such as the one above, he anatomizes the lengthy American and international history of entertaining deceptions — from P.T. Barnum to Rachel Dolezal, from Edgar Allan Poe to Nasdijj, from the Hitler Diaries to Jerzy Kosinski — and does so in a way that reveals and critiques the racist underpinnings of many such notorious fabrications.

Young acknowledges various European hoaxes while raising the central question: “Is there something especially American about the hoax?” Exploring the answers, he continually returns to the multifarious ways in which “an eighteenth-century Counter-Enlightenment, with its mistrust of science and history of hoaxes, could actually join with the Enlightenment and its love of systems to spawn the pseudosciences of the nineteenth century — particularly those that sought to create not just taxonomies but hierarchies between the races.”

Young — the author of 11 collections of poetry, as well as the nonfiction book “The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness” — serves as the poetry editor of The New Yorker and the director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His copious research, his talents in literary analysis and his associative skills as a poet are on acrobatic display as he argues convincingly that the hoax is all too often an underrecognized mechanism for maintaining white — and to a concurrent extent, male — supremacy.

He writes, for instance, about Joice Heth, the black woman that P.T. Barnum exploited for an act in 1835 in which “she pretended to be George Washington’s nursemaid, which would have made her 161 years old,” and points out later how, “Simultaneously celebrated and denigrated, often through the very body she supposedly nurtured and wet-nursed with, Heth stands as one of a long line of black women forced to prove their womanity.”

Throughout, Young makes elucidating comparisons across the ages, such as how the “penny press,” which fanned the flames of hucksterism in the 1800s, finds its parallel in the internet today insofar as “it too implements chaos as a going concern.” Or how the fraudulent “girl wonder” Opal Whiteley — who self-published “The Fairyland Around Us” at 22 and “dressed as an obligatory ‘Indian’ ” in the 1920s — has her parallel in the plagiarism case of novelist Kavya Viswanathan in the early 2000s.

Admittedly, hoaxes are a shaggy subject, yet one wishes that Young’s book were a bit more trim, as he turns and returns to subjects across chapters in a nonlinear and at times perplexing and repetitive fashion. As a result, brilliant as its parts are, Young’s book as a whole comes off as less of a spotlight illuminating its dim-by-design subject in a cohesive glow and more of a sparser set of Christmas lights — bright spots placed along a strand with perhaps a bit too much murkiness in between for the pattern to come through as clearly as might be desirable.

Nevertheless, his profound assertion that “the hoax changes history and also the future” shines through; he writes: “It’s the worst kind of twofer: the hoax is ultimately a matter of life and death.”

Young’s groundbreaking study of spectacles and spectacular falsehoods reaches its audience roughly one year after the election of Donald Trump. Obviously, Young was hard at work on this book well before it became clear that a man who routinely denigrates minorities and women and blithely dismisses inconvenient aspects of reality would hold the highest office in the United States.

Although the book doesn’t center on the Trump presidency, Young does analyze how significant portions of Melania Trump’s 2016 Republican National Convention speech were stolen from Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech at the Democratic National Convention, and how Mrs. Trump’s status as an immigrant from Solvenia was “championed in a way the candidate would explicitly deny Muslims and Mexicans.”

As we enter the second year of the Trump administration — with its railing against “fake news,” its failure to unilaterally condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville and its assertion that climate change is itself a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese — this book could scarcely be more timely or useful.

[Audacia Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin Young’s book is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) chronicle of the American history of hoaxing. He details many, many hoaxes and highlights the racist dimensions embedded in many of them - because the history of American bad behavior is always a history of racism. The book is dense stuff, injected with Young’s humor, and sometimes I found myself wishing that his editors reeled him in a little, but then a chunk of pages later I would understand why he was including alllllll the things. Really worth the investment of time to work through.

[Russell Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kevin Young's Bunk isn't, itself, "bunk," but there is a whole lot of posing and pretense in this long, ruminative, and ultimately unsatisfying study of "hoaxes, humbug, plagiarism, phonies, post-facts, and fake news." Young is a poet, and so very often he gets caught away in waxing clever or lyrical about some act of fakery that he is recounting, rather than carefully explaining and critiquing it. The first several chapters work pretty well; for a while, it really seemed as though Young was developing an actual critical thesis, as he used P.T. Barnum and a plethora of 19th-century and early 20th-century examples of side-show attractions and carnivalesque nonsense to distinguish (as Barnum himself did) between "humbug" and outright lies, as well as tie the often-denied-yet-still-constant American affection for (and expectation of) fakes, outrage, and spin to our complicated (and just as frequently denied) racial and sexual suspicions and curiosities. But in order for this critical work to hold, Young would need to be stylistically consistent and thorough in his treatment of ridiculous tabloid stories, pretend mediums, and imposters of numerous sorts, and he wasn't, especially as the book went on. Frequently he'd jump from one con man to another act of forgery, and there wouldn't even be a minimally required amount of historical information to know who or what, exactly, we were talking about.

In the end, Young's immense amount of research into this topic was obvious (the old playbills, news photographs, and drawings throughout the book are a delight), but while he obviously thought his presentation of it all added up to something, it didn't. Often--especially once he starts looking at literary plagiarists--it seems fairly event that Young is more interested in settling scores than anything else (his statement--for which he acknowledges his debt to Seinfeld--about Laura Albert, who punked much of America's sensationalist, low-brow literary set with her stories as "JT Leroy," is probably the truest thing in the book: "it offends me as a writer"--pg. 214). I learned a lot of trivia from the book, but I would have preferred, instead of the giant info dump, he'd really honed his arguments--or, failing that, he scrapped the huge sprawling mess in favor of some free-form which touch on the topic in a personal way (his chapter on Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who has apparently convinced herself--and long convinced others--that she is black, "Blacker than Thou," is written in this manner, and it's the best chapter in the book).

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

I decided to give up on this after a few chapters. There are a few interesting tid-bits, but this primarily feels like a book that re-interprets all hoaxes through the lens of race relations, which was not really what I signed up for, and doesn't seem amazingly elegantly done, to be honest. I may return to this later.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kevin Young’s Bunk richly details the history of hoaxes and deception in Western culture, from the age of P.T. Barnum to the Trump Administration. Young’s book explores a dizzying variety of materials from Barnum’s conscious sideshow “humbugs” to more serious literary and political deceptions. From the Feejee Mermaid to Balloon Boy, from the Cottingley Fairies to James Frey’s bogus memoirs, it’s (mostly) all here, although Young doesn’t offer a conventional catalogue of cons for light skimming. Rather, he places the hoaxes in broader of context of Western wrestling with race, gender and identity; he notes that hoaxes are often meant either to “prove” society’s extant stereotypes (as with African Americans drafted as “savage” African cannibals for sideshows) or to throw them into relief (as with the heinous “Noble Savage” narrative still present in modern travel writing). Or pseudoscientific musings, from the phrenology and “hysteria” studies of yesteryear to today’s obsessions with IQ (invariably broached among racial lines) and multiple personality disorder (the latter, especially, among white women). The result, whether consciously bigoted or ostensibly benign, casts those outside the racial and cultural norm as Other, either dread monsters barely human or exalted beings that are beyond human morality and understanding. Or, more grotesquely, by appropriating minority suffering to gain sympathy for the white hoaxer - up to outright impersonation, in the case of Klansman-turned-faux "Indian" novelist Asa Carter or our own era's Rachel Dolezal.

Young’s book, then, is more literary and sociological than historical: he grafts an imposing command of scientific (and pseudoscientific) literature, historical understanding and literary critique on his analysis of hoaxes. Besides the broader schema he employs, Young also treats hoaxes and forgeries as essentially confessions about the perpetrator’s true desires: James Frey, a frustrated novelist, repackaged his mediocre fiction into an acclaimed autobiography about drug abuse (conveniently strewn with racist tropes and cliches); Lee Israel, who viewed her work forging celebrity signatures as an extension of her biographical writings; Clifford Irving, who wrote books on spies and forgery before committing the ultimate forgery in Howard Hughes’ “autobiography”; false Holocaust memoirs from those who wished to relieve survivor’s guilt or inject meaning into their lives. It’s a dizzying panoply of deception, sometimes amusing, sometimes headshakingly weird or blithely offensive. But as Young shows, and the past five years of political discord have further proven, there’s a high cost to a culture where truth has no value greater than what an individual claims.

[Lance · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. It seemed like something George Carlin might write if he had the inclination to become a conventional scholar rather than a stand-up comedian. But the more I read the book, the more aggravated I became. The book is split between insightful commentary and pretentious nonsense. Bunk has a great core idea: the way in which hoaxes play on our preconceptions, especially preconceptions about race, but muddles that idea with tortuous prose, pedantic digressions, and logic that is occasionally faulty and even hypocritical.

Young’s prose—the first distraction one notices—is dense, and stuffed to the breaking point with plays on words, coinages, and taxonomies that Young means to reveal subtle shades of meaning, but these strategies prove pedantic and eye-roll-worthy slightly more often than insightful. I can understand this approach to a point, given that Young is a poet first and historian second, but when you’re writing a non-fiction book, the aim of which is to provide some hard-nosed Truth with a capital “T,” then your prose ought to be as lucid and direct as possible.

As aggravating as this can be, I could stand it a whole lot better if the logic embedded in the prose were still solid, and sometimes it is, but other times Young obfuscates his point with meaningless digressions. My least favorite example occurs when Young weighs in on how to maintain the numerous bumps that journalistic integrity has suffered in the past few years. Young describes, among others, the scandal surrounding the “Jimmy’s World” story by Janet Cooke for The Washington Post—a story about a black teenager addicted to heroin who turned out to be a fabrication of Cooke’s. Young has several good things to say in this section about how good journalism can be cultivated and maintained. The argument flags, however, when he tries to offer an elaboration on the remarks Benjamin Bradlee—the famous Washington Post editor who oversaw Carl Bernstein’s and Bob Woodward’s coverage of the Watergate scandal—makes in his memoir:

'It should be said that this, like most journalistic hoaxes, was ultimately discovered by other journalists. As Bradlee says in his memoir, “The fact is that the truth does emerge, and its emergence is a normal, and vital, process of democracy. If readers are generally too impatient to wait for the truth to emerge, that is a problem. It is our problem in the press. It is far easier and more comfortable for them to accept as truth whatever fact fits their own particular bias, and dismiss whatever facts misfit their biases.” Such biases are why objectivity became a standard in the first place, and, inasmuch as they threaten the accuracy I would advocate instead, I can see why objectivity remains necessary.'

Neither in the preceding nor subsequent paragraphs does Young clarify what the difference between accuracy and objectivity is. One can speculate that objectivity is merely a state of mind, and that accuracy is the desired result from objectivity. Maybe it makes sense to emphasize that objectivity is only desirable insofar as it produces results, but it pretty much goes without saying that accuracy is the desired result of objectivity anyway, so there was no need to make the distinction in the first place.

Occasionally Young’s interpretations can even prove slightly hypocritical. Among the exhaustive set of terms Young uses to describe the false sense of reliability on which hoaxes hinge is the term, “truthiness,” which he borrows from Stephen Colbert. It’s a great way of stating the frame of mind that hoaxes prey on and reinforce. Not long after introducing this term, Young brings up Tim Barrus, who, under the pseudonym Nasdijj, published three memoirs that depicted his struggles as a Native American. Inquiries by real Spokane-Couer d’Alene-American writer Sherman Alexie would unmask Barruss as white, and his memoirs as not only fabricated, but largely plagiarized from Alexie’s work. Young then goes into a digression about Barruss’s plagiarizing the pain, not only of Native Americans, but of Vietnam War Veterans as well. HE comments on the long history of phony veterans as detailed in the book Stolen Valor, which points out how many of these pretend soldiers used the character of John Rambo as a template for their fabrications. On the subject of why Rambo would have special interest for Barruss specifically, Young has this to say: “Rambo is not only a lost warrior but a symbolic white-Indian survivalist, greased up in militant blackface, out for revenge.”

This is the point where Young goes just a little too far, to the point where he himself falls prey to truthiness. Just because John Rambo greases up his face and hides out in the woods, does not automatically make him a symbolic white Indian. I can understand that a highly trained green beret and a nineteenth century Native American would have many overlapping survival skills, but knowing how to survive in the woods is not an exclusive Native American domain; it’s part and parcel of any special operative’s training, and helps to keep them alive in dangerous situations. I can also understand that the face camouflage Rambo uses might call up unfortunate associations with minstrelsy, but facial camouflage was likewise not created in order to ape blackface; facial camouflage is also a completely utilitarian practice designed to protect someone’s life in combat.

Young delves even further into this misguided tangent, using the protagonist from Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen as an example of a white-Indian. He cites the image of her running through the woods with a bow, and her olive-skinned complexion, as author Suzanne Collins describes her, as evidence. But olive skin isn’t used to describe Native Americans. It’s used to describe someone from the Mediterranean region, and given that Katniss is actually a name for a plant whose Latin genus comes from Sagittarius—the archer from Greco-Roman myth—a far more convincing argument could be made for her being Greek or Italian in heritage, though neither the books nor the films explicitly say. When Young fails to dig deep enough to make these distinctions one can’t help but feel that he has his own weakness for the truthiness that he condemns: jumping onto something that supports his argument simply because it feels like it could be true, and not necessarily because it stands up under dispassionate scrutiny.

All these shortcomings are actually all the more aggravating not because the book contains nothing but drivel, but because there are actually some very insightful and persuasive passages. It just sucks having to wade through so many bad puns and illogical leaps in reasoning to get to them. The passages on Nasdijj, the fake Navajo—Rambo and Katniss drawbacks notwithstanding—has great comments on how Barruss’s dishonesty served his own financial gain partially by drawing attention away from real Native American experience. Another great section involves the “memoir” of Marlo Morgan, whose book, Mutant Message Down Under conveniently makes use of Aboriginal people as a means for the spiritual enlightenment and financial gain of a white author, while completely ignoring the activity of real Aboriginal Rights groups in Australia. It’s upsetting because Young’s shortcomings here don’t undermine his book so much as bury it under a mass of self-indulgent, under-edited bloat. There are topics here that are explored insightfully, and I can at least tip my hat to Young for the scale of the book’s ambition, and the several good book recommendations I got out of it from his bibliography. Plunge in if you dare, but be prepared for a frustrating read.

Final Score: 4.5/10

[Jon Pentecost · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a hoax.
Or more properly, a humbug. A humbug was one of those circus sideshows (like a Feejee Mermaid, a missing link that was actually a black man from Chicago with his hair done strangely, or alien remains that were actually a cow fetus). A humbug claimed to be something other than what it was on the outside, in order to lure the crowds in. But even if you could spot the humbug, you were glad you came, because it was entertaining.

In the same way, Young's book is presented as a history of hoaxes, plagiarism and the like. But it is more of a collection of meditations on different hoaxes and scams throughout the last couple hundred years. It is well researched, but it is markedly different in its feel and texture from a standard historical work. He is less concerned with full-orbed analysis as he is drawing out the implications of these events on two areas in particular that Young deeply cares about (race and perceptions of race, and writing and creativity). Young doesn't so much build arguments as his analysis of these events, but makes cleverly worded assertions.

It is a book of poetry masquerading as prose.

So it was not what I expected it to be. That said, I am glad I came for the show. Though Young didn't provide many answers in terms of cultural analysis, he did provoke many questions. I learned from his perspective on these issues. He provided a clear image of how institutions in America (even institutions of entertainment) feed off of racial stereotypes (though he didn't so much explain why that might be, as much as convey outrage at the fact). And he certainly ably conveyed the danger of a 'post-truth' society in his later chapters.
Interesting book.

[Ronnie Cramer · Rating 1 out of 5]

A look at the table of contents made me anxious to read this book as it listed dozens of interesting historical hoaxes, forgeries, etc. But despite coming in at over 600 pages, the book provides very little history of the events listed. The bulk of the space is given to the author's rambling, would-be intellectual/academic reactions to each hoax.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating (and possibly reassuring) look at the American history of faking it when it comes to information. Definitely not for the casual reader -- the book is dense, full of footnotes, and delves deep -- it is nevertheless quite a ride into the unbelievable.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our critical faculties seem neutralized by the lie we are ready to swallow. Bradlee said it: Beware of the lie you want to believe. The old ones are funny; the current ones are terrifying.

[Grace Tenkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

History, written in a fairly entertaining way.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required reading for anyone who reads critically, writes for publication and/or academic credit, or creates in any artistic genre and performs/exhibits her work for public audiences.

[Leo Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A super-detailed and super interesting look into the history of bunk, confidence men, hoaxes and hokum. Young starts with P.T. Branum, who's famous quote sums up hoaxers at their best: "Every crowd has a silver lining."

Get it? It's a clever, rhyming re-wording of an old wives tale.

Anyways, Young traces the development of American bunk (which he calls BS, an apt label) through Donald Trump's run of four-Pinocchio ratings for his public distortions and outright lies about the facts. But this doesn't descend into name-calling. Instead, he places Trump in context. Which makes for far more interesting reading than another anti-Trump screed. Because the focus is not on Trump, but his forebearers in the Blarney world.

I enjoyed this more than I expected. The material was as fun to read as any novel. And Young's style, while thorough, never seems to drag.

Four stars.

[Immigration Art · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book about bunk IS BUNK itself. It could have been an interesting, engaging work. Instead, it is a rambling mess of illogical reaching for predetermined conclusions about the direct link between hoaxes in American history -- all hoaxes -- and racism.

Spot a hoax? The cause is racism. Period.

The language is dense and more appropriate for a PhD thesis . . . And I am not impressed. The author needs to get his head out of the academic clouds and get back to the real world -- or his publisher needs to market this book as a text for a navel-gazing graduate sociology seminar.

And the EDITOR must have been asleep or inept. The passages seem endless, and disjointed ideas are beaten to death and remain anything but cogent.

Waste of money. Waste of time. Steer clear. Do not buy. Do not borrow.

In an amusing review on Amazon, one reader wrote:

"The moon hoax? Antiblack racism. The fairy photo hoax? Racist. Fake child prodigies? Racist. While there are examples of actual racism in the book, by a quarter of the way through the extreme reaching to call everything in sight racist leaves me no doubt where the rest of this dismal book is going and I have no interest in finishing."

Amen.

[Andre(Read-A-Lot)]

I know it’s not a good way to start a new year, but I couldn’t maintain a consistent interest in reading this book. I was initially interested in learning about hoaxes, humbugs and such, but the dense ness of the material along with the bland presentation left me sapped Of energy and initiative and the end result is this is the second book to land on my did-not-finish list.

[Benjamin Stahl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This gets certainly an A for effort. And perhaps A+ for research. But if I were some stamp-happy professor who is too scared to fail his students because he values his lunch breaks too much, I would have a hard time justifying to myself full marks for Young's submission since it put me to sleep more than anything else.

[Jason Diamond · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece. How do you get this into the hands of every high school student?

[Isabelle reads a book a day because she has no friends · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. This was very interesting yet boring at the same time—I found myself reading a little bit at a time, putting it down for awhile, and not really wanting to pick it back up again.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title is a bit unappealing, but Kevin Young’s book about hoaxes, liars, and impostors is well-written and hugely entertaining. I hope in calling it “entertaining” I’m not enjoying, voyeuristically, the pain of others: one of his main points is how hoaxers, impostors, and plagiarizers often steal, capitalize on, and monetize the pain that properly belongs to others – often Others like the racially marginalized. In the 1830s P.T. Barnum bought, exhibited, and toured Joice Heth, a black woman he claimed was George Washington’s nursing mammy, now supposedly 161 years old. When Heth died Barnum subjected her body to a public autopsy, charging admission.

In more modern times, a white hoaxer, Margaret Seltzer, calling herself “Margaret B. Jones,” published to great acclaim a memoir, “Love and Consequences,” in which she claimed to have been raised in black foster homes in gang-infested south central L.A. She wrote in great detail about the Crips and the Bloods (her foster family was in the Bloods) and how she had made drug deliveries for gang leaders at age 13, but in reality she had grown up in prosperous Sherman Oaks and attended a private school. “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot,” Seltzer claimed to the New York Times.

Seltzer’s story might have hung together longer, except that she was interviewed for a piece in the Times’ House & Home section. Her sister read it, saw a photo of Seltzer and her 8-year-old daughter, and blew the whistle. “For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Seltzer told the Times after being exposed. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing - I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

This immediately sounds like a load of twaddle, and of course it is, but Young (who doesn’t include the above juicy quote in his book) writes that “Intimacy remains one of the hoax’s best weapons: it is especially easy to speak for those we aren’t exactly interested in hearing from.” He gives examples of white writers posing as Asian poets, as Native Americans. The con artist is a narcissist, and Seltzer immediately reframes her con as an act of munificence.

The topics of circuses and P.T. Barnum induce in me a near-existential ennui, so I plodded through some of Bunk’s early chapters. (The book is dedicated to Richard Eoin Nash, “the first to suggest that Barnum should not be buried in the book as he once was.”) Once these were gotten through, the book became highly captivating, with Young often intruding pleasantly: “Go, go becomes a refrain through the book [The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams by hoaxer Tim Barrus, writing as phony Navajo Nasdijj], said by ghastly Tommy upon his return. After a while, the refrain began to remind me of the Go Go Gophers, that late-1960s cartoon in reruns when I was little, the gophers being two excitable, bucktoothed Indians.”

Young also remembers his local NPR station interviewing Seltzer when her book came out, “and after hearing only a few responses, I told my wife, who’d been listening along, that it sounded like the corniest, Boyz in the Hood-era clichés about gang life I had ever heard.”

In 1995, then 24-year-old reporter Ruth Shalit wrote an article for The New Republic about affirmative action at the Washington Post. The piece, which claimed that the Post had lowered its standards in order to increase diversity, caused an uproar, and turned out to be riddled with errors. Post publisher Donald Graham wrote that The New Republic’s motto ought to be “Looking for a qualified black since 1914.” (The magazine was started in 1914, and had never had a black writer or staff member.) Already, before publishing the article, TNR had had to acknowledge that Shalit “had used material from other publications without attribution,” noted media columnist Howard Kurtz in the Post in 1995. She had also written that one man had served time for corruption when he had never been indicted. Interviewed by Kurtz, Shalit said that “There's something Nixon-like about [the Post management’s] complete denial” regarding her story. Shalit acknowleged to Kurtz that her “story had a certain tilt, an edge." "We're an opinion magazine," Shalit said. She told Kurtz “her opinion is that "the ethos of diversity is ultimately on a collision course with the ethos of newspapering."”

A New York Times article at the time contained the quote: “"The article was the most racist piece of so-called journalism I have read in modern times," said DeNeen L. Brown, an education reporter at the [Washington Post] who is black.” Shalit’s article quoted several anonymous white staffers at the Post who had supposedly said of black colleagues “she can’t write a lick” and “he’s dumb as a post.”

(Interestingly, Kevin Young writes that the most racist article he’s ever read is a piece by serial fabricator and plagiarist Stephen Glass, who was also at TNR, his first for the magazine and a cover story about black and Arab taxi and livery drivers in D.C.)

Even after TNR settled a lawsuit (from the man who had been falsely accused of corruption) and Shalit was placed on leave, she was allowed to return. “But people who work at the magazine say she was still a nightmare to fact check and remained confused about the gravity of what she did for a living,” wrote journalist David Carr in 1999. Shalit plagiarized again and again, usually proclaiming her innocence and blaming copy-and-paste errors. Young writes, “Shalit’s computer keyboard just seemed stuck on steal.”

Young published this in 2017. In October 2020, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple noticed that Shalit, now rechristened Ruth S. Barrett, had written an article about niche sports in wealthy Fairfield County, Connecticut for the Atlantic. He also noticed that the article contained some wild and unlikely anecdotes, such as about fencing injuries and people building Olympic-sized hockey rinks in their backyards. "This is an excellent story, which is why we published it. It illuminates the extreme lengths some affluent parents are taking to get their kids into elite colleges and reproduce class advantage. Our readers are enjoying it,” the Atlantic told Wemple. Wemple continued to investigate and found other instances of fabrication in the article. Ultimately the Atlantic retracted it – they had just been trying to give Shalit “a second chance” – but now regretted that decision. A postmortem at the magazine revealed that due to editors and staffers referring to the article before publication as “the Barrett piece,” other top editors didn’t realize the piece was by serial-plagiarist Shalit.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars. A lot of mixed feelings here, but reading this was overall a very positive, thought-provoking experience. There is so much research here about the history of hoaxes, and the (not) surprising thing is how much all the fakery is steeped in race and racism. That this book looks at hoaxes through a racial lens really elevates it to the "essential reading" category and provokes a more nuanced discussion of the subject. I think there's something in here that will interest everybody...personally, I enjoyed the later chapters on journalism and literature.

That said, Bunk is not at all a casual read. It caught my eye mostly because of my interest in Kevin Young's work as a poet...also because it's called Bunk, how can you not want to read a book with that kind of title? In any case, I kind of jumped into it on a whim and wasn't altogether prepared for the undertaking. The subject may suggest a fun, pop-psychology leaning, but this book is long and sort of dry and dense as hell. I'm never one to shy away from big books, but a stronger editorial hand would have benefited Bunk - cutting down on less relevant information, structuring it in a less scatterbrained way, and yes (sadly) correcting typos. It's painfully obvious, for instance, that the chapter on Rachel Dolezal was a last-minute addition, as it's stylistically and formally inconsistent with the rest of the book. Dolezal is definitely a vital addition to this conversation, and Young's commentary on her is otherwise on point.

So, tl;dr, I enthusiastically recommend this book for its cultural and historical relevance and intrigue, but be prepared to commit to some heavy lifting.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fair warning: this book is highly erudite - in fact, it is probably fair to call it “wordy”. It is an academic-style philosophizing historical analysis of public frauds. There are those like PT Barnum, who seems to have expected a large swath of his audience to be in on the hoax and enjoy it anyway, to people like James Frey, who try to get away with selling false memoirs, or absolute loonies like Rachel Dolezal - plus all the fakery that brought us to the age of “truthiness”. The language is thick and the frauds are all over the place. The examples and analysis could have been tightened and edited some; I wonder how often Young, a renowned poet, has really written this kind of long, analytical prose. However, relating these various deceptions back to prejudice and bigotry, especially that against race, is a well-made and thoughtful point throughout the story. We are, indeed, bamboozled.

[Kelley · Rating 1 out of 5]

Couldn’t make it past page 50. Compelling and interesting topic, but the writing style wasn’t for me. Took me almost a month to do those 50 pages. Kept picking it up then putting it down. Bummer. This was our July NF book club pick and almost everyone has voted to toss this one.

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

America's fetish is having the wool pulled over its eyes. We love it. Kevin Young’s exhaustive study BUNK: THE TRUE STORY OF HOAXES, HUCKSTERS, HUMBUG, PLAGIARISTS, FORGERIES AND PHONIES begins with the more benign Barnum and ends with Trump, the real cancer on the presidency. In-between the history of a young country making up its own myths turns darker. Scratch America and you’ll find racism, which Young sees as the engine driving all the examples he cites, from the obvious to the obscure. It’s hard not to agree with his manifesto. Racism is as American as apple pie and the one founding father of our country who stands not wholly hidden in the shadows of our history. True as this might be, I’d have found it myopic if Young didn’t include other races, women and Jews in his book. The subject matter isn’t unique to the United States, of course -- pranks likely predate language -- but Young’s focus is on the New World, so it’s only right that race is the target of his investigation. Young is a fine writer, and even when he gets a bit punny, his point is never less than learned and insightful. Even when I found myself at odds with some of his conclusions, I had to step back and contemplate my own innate prejudices and if they were unconsciously guiding my decision. That’s young’s persuasive talent, and it ain’t no joke.

[Jennifer Abdo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always love a great book about hoaxes, cults and pseudoscience. This one puts race front and center in a way the white authors I've read fail to do. The false memoir is a particularly interesting bit and doubles are mentioned. If you've read Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, that may resonate. While it doesn't focus on Trump, that is the inescapable time and context in which the book was written. Through a history of spirit photography, hoaxes, plagiarism, and fake memoirs we're asked to think of truth as a muscle that has atrophied. We can reclaim it if we choose. I hope we collectively choose that soon.

I'll note the last part of the quote. It feels like it's talking about lots of bad things - oppressive authoritarian religions, Zionism, American militarism/imperialism.

"Hoaxers wound the world and then say, see how the world is wounded? the whole world is fake and then say they are all that's real. Such behavior they share with cult leaders, whether Jim Jones and his People's Temple or the millennial Heaven's Gate followers. It's no accident that Morgan's Real People are apocalyptic cultists: whenever such a group insists its reality is the only one, that reality inevitably becomes more and more extreme, ending the only way it can, in extinction. The result is not only deadly but deadening."

[Jim Leckband · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Bunk" visits America's favorite pastime: making sh*% up to fraud, delude, or just bamboozle. Like a virus, bunk needs a host with the correct phalanges to attach itself. Young's argument is that America's host is racism.

To me this was a novel idea, and it does cast a new way of looking at hoaxes and scams through America's history. Of the racism of the Tea Party (the original) dressed as Native Americans, of how Jim Crow laws came out of the fake news of the day, etc. Of course, not every hoax can be attributed to having racist motivations, but an awful lot of them hinge on calling out the racism of the hoaxes intended targets.

The book took a while to get used to. Young's style is very colloquial, but in an academic harness. He does need to have the details nailed down if he doesn't want to fall in the hoax's traps by blindly parroting stuff - so there is a sizable footnote and bibliography section.

And of course, the book makes it very abundantly clear how the Orange pall has engulfed so much of this country - and the relationship of racism to the never-ending hoaxes, grifts, and scams of that pall.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kevin Young recounts a history of hoaxes in the United States from P. T. Barnum to the present day, delving deep to look at ways in which hoaxers have influenced events, ideas, and even society as a whole. It's a thoughtful, complex book, one that often points out hoaxes which reinforced racial, gender, and other forms of inequality. Young's work verges on the poetic at times, a book that would be worth a second or third read to really absorb all the details and ideas.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hoaxes are "like porn: the goal of the hoax is to see just how long you can keep it up" writes Young. The author takes an encyclopedic approach (often long and dry passages) and gives us a catalogue of the biggest and best hoaxes ever: in other words, the ones we liked most. If you're looking for a rant against certain media outlets or today's politicians, you won't find it here. Young aims at those who "collaborate with the hoax, and collude with it; the hoaxer just gets there first, making unwilling conspirators of us all." Young's final words are hopeful: "The facts are on our side; let's hope the fictions once again will be too."

[Sean Owen · Rating 1 out of 5]

American history is rife with examples of hoaxes and hustlers. There's a bit of ebb and flow, but they've been there from the start. Anytime there's a chance to make a buck someone has been looking for a shortcut. With a noted bullshit artist ascending to the presidency now would be the perfect time for a cataloging of the American history of bunk. We didn't create bunk, but we certainly elevated it.

Unfortunately "Bunk" is not the book to take on this task. Kevin Young doesn't actually want to catalog these incidents, but instead skips over the details and dives right into subjecting each hoax to pompous university navel-gazing cultural criticism. While it would be worthwhile to look at a lot of these hoaxes through the filter of race in America Young again and again puts race at the center of his analysis at the expense of everything else.

This confused focus is made worse by Young's unreadable writing style. He writes like an undergraduate trying to brag and impress with every circuitous sentence. He favors attempts at witticism over clarity.

"Bunk" is a really disappointing book because the idea is so necessary. I'd love to see a more capable writer with less of an ideological axe to grind take on the subject.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes you finish a book and wonder why you even read it. This book was twenty hours of various hoaxes from Barnum to Ponzi; including everything from forged paintings, false autobiographies of invented lives, plagiarism, and blackface along the way. I was generally entertained working my way through it but did finish the thing with more of an obligation towards the end than interest. We get it: people lie about lots of things for lots of reasons!

[J. Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I found this compulsive reading, this is a dense book which required a bit of thinking between sections. Young dives straight into his topic from the first chapter without any kind of overview/introduction and asks readers to find their bearings as he swiftly moves into his first hoax. Some of the other reviews on Goodreads seem upset that this is not a history book and I don't think it suggests it will be? Young reviews hundreds of hoaxes but clearly his intention is analysis and rumination, not simply recitation of fact. His ideas here - about the racial underbelly of lies and fakery in the United States - are constantly shuffled together to show new resonances of ideas previously explored. Stories recur and return with new valences. I quite enjoyed this and cannot wait to read The Grey Album