Download Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News AudioBook Free
Bunk traces the history of the hoax as a peculiarly American trend, examining what motivates hucksters and makes the rest of us so gullible. Disturbingly, Young locates that fakery is woven from stereotype and suspicion, contest being the most insidious American hoax of all. He chronicles how Barnum arrived to fame by displaying information like Joice Heth, a dark girl whom he pretended was the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington, and THE FACTS?, an African-American man Barnum professed was a newly discovered missing link in evolution. Bunk then becomes to the hoaxing of history and the techniques forgers, plagiarists, and journalistic fakers invent backstories and falsehoods to sell us is about themselves and about the world inside our own time, from pretend Local Americans Grey Owl and Nasdijj to the fatal imposture of Clark Rockefeller, from the made-up memoirs of Wayne Frey to the individuality fraud of Rachel Dolezal. On this brilliant and timely work, Young asks what this means to live in a post-factual world of "truthiness" where everything is up for interpretation and many people are subject to a pervasive cynicism that damage our ideas of truth, fact, and skill.
