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.

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 thing...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

History, written in a fairly entertaining way.

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 hist...

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.

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 insiste...

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 dev...

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.

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 l...

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 doe...

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 h...

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...perso...

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’...

"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