Kevin Young's Bunk Reviewed at 4Columns

A review of Kevin Young's Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf) is up at 4Columns. "Young demonstrates how time and again Americans are fooled and schooled," writes Bliss Broyard. More:

By co-opting the voices of the marginalized and delivering them back in cartoonish distortions, “hoaxers erase those their story purports to represent.” Young offers the example of Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival by Margaret B. Jones, a.k.a a white woman named Margaret Seltzer, who reinvents herself as a half-white, half-Native orphan raised in a black foster family in South Central LA who falls into gang life. The book cover of an older black woman embracing a young white girl (a composite of stock photos from Getty) and the bad slang—“Aiight, sho nuff”—suggest “that few to no black people seem to have weighed in on the book’s publication in its years-long journey from pitch to print.” Rather, these choices indict the blinkered views held by publishing’s mostly white gatekeepers—a gate Seltzer the hoaxer waltzed on through.

The most unimaginable life experiences become not enough. In Angel at the Fence, Holocaust survivor Herman Rosenblat embellishes his true story of survival in the Buchenwald camp with a fabricated one about living off of the apples that his future wife threw over the fence. This version has the couple reuniting on a blind date in the United States years later. Again, Winfrey, queen of daytime TV and champion of fake memoirs, declared it the “single greatest love story.” Young writes: “The horror story must become a love story, an American tragedy with a happy ending.” 

Collectively, our memories construct our view of history. Fake memoirs masquerading as accurate accounts of historical events sully our understandings of these moments as surely as if Pennywise the Clown had snuck in to photobomb the scene. Everything around him is rendered absurd and vulnerable to doubt by his presence. When the portrait in question concerns historical traumas such as the Holocaust, or the experience of life on an Indian reservation or as a child prostitute, Young demonstrates that this sullying isn’t simply a pathetic grab for attention. It’s a violation against all the people who were genuinely affected.

Check out the full review at 4Columns.