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Reviews
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young
kittey2ng's review against another edition
huh? not what I thought it would be at all
katel1970's review against another edition
3.0
This book took me 12 weeks to read. It was dense and a bit of a slog, but it also had some fascinating stories and gorgeous turns of phrase. I liked the second half of the book much more than the first half, but you need to read it all because he refers back to instances he reports on in the early chapters in the later chapters, and he builds his argument block by block.
thompson626's review against another edition
Writing is too dry, hard to follow the exact topic of each chapter.
alexisrt's review against another edition
4.0
Kevin 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.
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.
chillcox15's review against another edition
5.0
Feel like a lot of people went into this expecting a straightforward history of the subject matter instead of a poetic-academic tour de force of strong wordplay and strong conviction. Will have to think long n hard about what the exact value is of reasserting truth in an era of unprecedented untruth. It's there, but what is it?
bunrab's review against another edition
2.0
Way too long and way too disjointed. There's some interesting stuff in there but I had to go look some of it up on the internet, because the author's way of presenting it seemed to start with the assumption that I was already familiar with it, so he didn't have to explain who the characters were or what the beginning was. Even the typeface and formatting of the book contributes, as the pages are much too crowded. A lot of the premise seems to be that many hoaxes existed, and still exist, to exploit colonialism and racism and to encourage fears based on racism.
waybacknaveen's review against another edition
dark
informative
slow-paced
4.0
come for the circus and freak show history, stay for the Virginia Woolf blackface story
audaciaray's review against another edition
4.0
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.
mnboyer's review against another edition
2.0
This was a slow start and as I continued to trudge through it I said to myself This is bunk, I'm not going to finish this and I have never gone back to it. Just wasn't a writing style that was able to capture me and get me really interested in what sounded like an otherwise fun-filled, interesting topic.