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.