Kevin Young’s Bunk

As a country, we are quickly losing our grasp on the definition of truth. Following the example set by the president of the United States, citizens decry factual but unflattering media reports as “fake” while often accepting utterly bogus conspiracy theories from the likes of right-wing shock-jock Alex Jones. In Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, author Kevin Young traces the roots of these manipulations and describes them as an American phenomenon that is often anchored in white people’s twisted ideas about race.

Young begins this history in the days of P.T. Barnum and his sideshow of hoaxes — such as the black woman he claimed was the childhood nurse of George Washington and was also 161 years old. Young lays out our slippery and ambivalent relationship to being lied to and details the contemporary stories of memoirists James Frey and J.T. LeRoy, who wrote falsely about their lives, utilizing stereotypes about race and class along the way, as well as Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who pretended to be African American for years and even led a chapter of the NAACP before her deception was uncovered. He explores the fabulist machinations of journalists Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Janet Cooke, the last of whom won a Pulitzer Prize for a profile of an eight-yearold African-American heroin addict who turned out to be fictional.

Young is a poet, essayist, and educator, and he takes a poet’s approach to nonfiction; though the book contains tremendous amounts of research, he can be more invested in his turns of phrase than his clarity of expression. This sometimes makes for a bumpy read, at least tonally, but the book is never dry. — Jennifer Levin

Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young is published by Graywolf Press.