Can I read Bunk : the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News on EtoBox?

Bunk : the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News by Kevin Young is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Bunk : the Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-facts, and Fake News about?

915 pages (large print) : 25 cm "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 journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us lies about themselves and about the world in our own time, from pretend Native Americans like 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 p

Author

Kevin Young

Publisher

Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company

Published

2018

Language

EN

ISBN

9781432850210

Subjects

History, Social Science, Humanities

Rating

3.6 / 5 (121 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14