Bunk

“Agassiz becomes the ultimate ‘lost race’ explorer, seeking to find an originating lost white tribe and a separate black ancestor that does not exist. All such racial rankings, their own form of hoax, have done worlds of harm. Is there any hoax more dangerous than this?” --165

Bunk by Kevin Young

Essential points: Poet Kevin Young’s monumental work on bunk, chronicling “hoaxes, humbug, plagiarists, phonies, post-facts, and fake news” is both fascinating and frustrating. The various historical—and recent—incidents of hoaxing and plagiarism that Young relates in well-researched detail are tumbled together like items in a curiosity shop, all thoroughly cobwebbed in a tangle of such recursive language that it’s sometimes hard to catch the wit, sensitivity, and pure intellectual force hidden within the congeries. Had Young worked chronologically, or edited his text toward a more restrained style, the book would have been more comprehensible. Had he limited the scope of his research to the hoax in America or had the underlying thesis that hoaxing and plagiarism have everything to do with race and class been more narrowly attended to, the book would have been more powerful. The book is fascinating and important, but by the end of even a few chapters will alienate many of the readers who would most benefit from it as they struggle through what quickly comes to feel like a writer’s passion project, taking only little notice of the reader. Subjects this book includes that some readers may be sensitive to (but which others will be thrilled to find sensitively discussed in their literature!): racism, lynching, freak show displays, the Holocaust, the KKK, and various other historical and present hate groups and acts.