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