Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News

A book by Kevin Young.

No one has reviewed it yet on Amazon. Released November 14, 2017.

Joseph Bottum reviews the book at Free Beacon.

The words bunkum, bunk, debunk, and the Bunco Squads that police forces used to have are derived from the name of Buncombe County, North Carolina. The words come from the need for a word to describe the polished spiel of confidence swindlers because the British term cozenage and the French term fourberie didn't have sufficient panache. Buncombe County in turn is named after Edward Buncombe, a plantation owner who served as a colonel in the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War.

The book is a mess. 500 pages of unrelated history bearing on fraud.

You will either love the sprawl of Bunk—the personalization, the wandering trails, the scent of musty archives explored in part for their musty scent—or you will hate the book's odd character: essentially Sir Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, hauled from 1646 into 2017. I hope you love it, for with Bunk, Kevin Young has produced a unique muddle, an eccentric masterpiece, and a slow-burn bonfire.

Acknowledging ancient and medieval frauds and admitting modern global instance, the author still holds there is something distinctively modern and possibly distinctively American about hoaxes and scams. With P.T. Barnum central to his thinking in the way that Barnum would play both ends. The 18th century was home to both the Enlightenment boast of the predominance of science and a counter-Enlightment distrust of science. Charlatans worked both currents. It was the Victorian era's Americans that gave rise to the fully self-conscious fraudulence, the pseudo-sciences of the 19th century, racial eugenics and phrenology, are derived from a peculiar combination of science and suspicion of science.

Hoaxers like Barnum would play both sides. "You decide," read an advertisement for his display of an ordinary-looking man. "Man or Monster" and for another example, "Missing Link or Simple Freak? For a monkey stitched to a fish. His genius was to turn spectacle as speculation into questions. His buncombe was filled with science terms such as "missing link" just a year after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. He flattered the viewer's scientific acumen and inverted skepticism to scientific doubt of science.

Bunk is not a linear argument. Rather it's a pile of propositions. And at the bottom of the pile is a notion about race.

The author is black himself and poetry editor of the New Yorker. His book is published by Graywolf, a literary press.

The review continues with more about Kevin Young and his relation to other authors on race-conscious works.