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Chargement... Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (édition 2017)par Kevin Young (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreBunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News par Kevin Young
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. An interesting book that I'm not sure earned its full page count (500+ in the print edition, I read an ebook from the library). The overall thesis is that hoaxes and fake news are built on an otherized foundation, usually racial but sometimes religious or other minority culture. The idea is that we're more willing to be fooled by "weird stuff" from cultures we consider "weird" to begin with—a fine assertion, and one I think is probably even true—but I was expecting this book more to be about the people who perpetrate hoaxes, not the, idk, sociology of hoaxes. As much as I hate the implications of this book, I loved the book itself. Young has brought me face to face with the racism that is part of the air we breathe in America, just as it most likely is everywhere. His book is filled with fascinating historical examples of "untruths" that some of us manage to perpetrate on others. His research is impeccable. Perhaps because he is a poet, I sometimes had to strain to catch the connections he was making. Sometimes I found them difficult to follow. I don't think racism itself is usually the overt intent of people who commit these acts. Sometimes these people are psychopaths who are merely out to game the system; sometimes they are mentally ill. But the fact remains, their "bunk" could not succeed if the wider society were not racist. He made me think and see things in a different way. I will be more conscious of my own reactions and thoughts due to this book. That is no small accomplishment for a writer to achieve. 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. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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"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 pervasive cynicism that damages our ideas of reality, fact, and art."--Dust jacket flap. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)001.95Information Computer Science; Knowledge and Systems Knowledge Controversial knowledge HoaxesClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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The ideas of how race, racism, and other cultural themes intertwine with hoaxes, liars, plagiarism, forgery, and more is provocative. He dives deeply into many instances historically and how culture has played a role in who, when, how, and why people choose to hoax or fake or bend the truth. The problem I experienced was that he dove so deeply and neglected to give the reader an oxygen tank. I was left drowning in all of the text. While he did make me chuckle at his word play occasionally, it mainly felt like he was writing for himself rather than trying to reach out and take the journey together.