Is flimflammery, like jazz, a pure product of America? So wonders New Yorker poetry editor Young (Blues Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems 1995-2015, 2016, etc.), adding another Americanism to the mix: Jim Crow.For whatever reason, Americans have always thrilled at being conned: thus televangelists and bullshit artists. Thus Herman Melville's great novel The Confidence-Man, and thus the result of the most recent presidential election. By Young's vigorous, allusive account, the suckerdom whose numbers are added to every minute has no end of choices when it comes to shopping for bunkum. What makes this book a valuable addition to the literature—otherwise, it might just be an update to Daniel Boorstin's half-century-old study The Image—is Young's attention to the racial component: P.T. Barnum built his fortune, after all, on the backs of people like Joice Heth, billed as a supposed 161-year-old wet nurse to George Washington, and putative cannibals from the South Pacific, and the like. Much bunkum had to do with the clash of cultures and races, from the mundane to the fabulous. Young's wide-ranging text takes in not just circus sideshows, but also the literary/journalistic fabulations of JT LeRoy, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Lance Armstrong, and other exemplars of what Young calls the "Age of Euphemism." Oh, and Rachel Dolezal, too, who infamously tried to pass as black not so long ago: "Did Dolezal really fool those black folks around her? I have a strange feeling she didn't, that many simply humored her. You have to do this with white people, from time to time." If that doesn't stir up identity-politics conflict, then nothing will….A little harsh here, a little overstated there, but all in all a fascinating, well-researched look at the many ways Americans hoodwink each other, often about race.

Poet and author Young (The Grey Album) chronicles a distinctly American brand of deception in this history of hoaxers, fabricators, liars, and imposters. Young traces the tradition of journalistic duplicity from an 1835 newspaper story reporting winged men on the moon to the fabrications by the New Republic-s Stephen Glass in the late 1990s. He explores forgeries and falsifications in literature, including the exaggerated claims of James Frey in his memoir A Million Little Pieces and the wholesale creation of false identities, providing the example of J.T. LeRoy, allegedly a child prostitute turned novelist but later revealed to be the literary persona of writer Laura Albert. While many of these hoaxes will be familiar to those with a decent grasp of American history and current events, there are plenty of obscure examples as well, such as the 1941 emergence of the nine-year-old poet-prodigy Fern Gravel, charmingly declared -the lost Sappho of Iowa- by the New York Times, who was later revealed to be the brainchild of author James Norman Hall. Young explores the many instances where the hoax intersects with race and racism, notably P.T. Barnum-s exploitation of the supposed centenarian Joice Heth, a black nursemaid of George Washington, and the more recent instance of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman pretending to be black, who led her local chapter of the NAACP. Using these examples, Young astutely declares the hoax a frequent metaphor for a -deep-seated cultural wish- that confirms prejudicial ideas and stereotypes. While the book suffers a bit from its glut of examples, Young-s remarks on race and his comparison of Trump and Barnum, both of whom gained power from spectacle, in the book-s coda are well worth sifting through the drier material. (Nov.)