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Fakers: Hoaxers, Con Artists, Counterfeiters, and Other Great Pretenders Hardcover – January 4, 2009

by Paul Maliszewski (Author)

8 customer reviews

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Editorial Reviews

Book by Maliszewski, Paul

Hardcover: 245 pages
Publisher: The New Press; First Edition edition (January 4, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1595584226
ISBN-13: 978-1595584229
Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 0.9 x 7.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 8 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,046,881 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1181 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > True Crime > Hoaxes & Deceptions
- #5928 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Social Psychology & Interactions
- #7124 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Social Psychology & Interactions

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Beautifully written but flimsy

March 12, 2009

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

One reason we are duped by frauds and fakers of the literary kind, argues Paul Maliszewski, is that "good writing gets confused with authentic experience." That's part of the problem with this book, which combines excellent writing and fascinating storytelling with a flawed and poorly articulated premise; that our increasingly complex lives make us somehow more prone to create -- and accept -- frauds and fakes of all kinds.

Reading this book in the wake of the Madoff scandal may strike a lot of nerves -- and indeed, the author does address the roots of the human willingness to believe, albeit in ways that anyone who has ever thought about the matter won't find too striking or original. The Madoff fraud occurred too recently for inclusion in this list of sins, while Maliszewski himself seems to rely very heavily on literary and journalistic frauds, both familiar (James Frey and Stephen Glass) and unfamiliar (the 'Spectra' school of poetry). Perhaps that's because the reason for Maliszewski's fascination with his subject originates in his own misdeeds; as a bored reporter, disgusted with the low standards of his managing editor, he set out to pull off a series of low-level frauds, creating contributors to the paper who didn't exist in real life and watching as their opinions and actions were given the Good Housekeeping seal of approval by being published.

There's no one as ardent in the pursuit of their perceived duty to society like a poacher turned gamekeeper, and Maliszewski's ability to pull the wool over the eyes of his erstwhile employer seem to have jaded him to such a degree that sometimes this book reads like a jeremiad. That's fine, but authors of jeremiads must never sound shrill, sour or arrogant (at times, this author crosses all those boundaries) and above all, they must display wit and erudition, the first of which is lacking and the second of which is inadequate for the task at hand. He's trying to get at the reasons that fakers want to deceive us, and the reasons they succeed. The prose the he produces is flawless: "Being fooled and believing seemed to me ... increasingly interchangeable, even indistinguishable. Belief collaborates with a lie. It smoothes over the lie's rough edges until the lie feels silken." The arguments? Not so much. He implies that the more we rely on excessive media consumption to filter our reality, the more we are vulnerable to falling victim to fakers who, by offering us access to an experience that feels as if it should be real, promise us a view "however fleeting, of a great thing rarely glimpsed." And yet his examples show us that people have used the media for hoaxes long before Jayson Blair snookered the editors and readers of the New York.

The underlying question -- what is fiction and what is reality? -- is important enough to deserve a more carefully structured and thoughtful analysis than Maliszewski's memoir-ish tour through a selection of his personal favorites in his collection of hoaxes. It's interesting enough, very well written, but the undertone of anger (at us and himself for falling victim to this, as well as at the hoaxers themselves) ultimately becomes irksome. The book's structure -- a combination of memoir-style essays, analytical essays, Q&As with hoaxers, short anecdotes -- also felt flimsy and contributed to the sense that a central unifying theme was missing. His insights as erratic as the book's structure, sometimes thoughtful (as in his ruminations on Stephen Glass "selling the palaver right back to them" by delivering articles that his editors never questioned because they were precisely what the latter wanted to receive) but also venturing into the banal. (For instance; "Hope quiets doubts and, in doing so, make the extraordinary and fictional seem tenable.")

Intriguing, but ultimately its value lies in Maliszewski's own ability to recount a good story rather than analyze his subject. A tentative 3.5 stars; certainly not 4 stars.

On a related subject, plagiarism (there's been a lot of that around lately, too), you might want to check out a wonderful book on the topic by Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words - The Classic Book on Plagiarism, which would collect a solid 4 stars from me as being fascinating, quirky, well-written and providing the kind of analytic and narrative arc that is missing in Maliszewski's book.

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SY Jung

Good read.

May 22, 2014

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

I enjoyed this book immensely. It is well written and kept my interest throughout.

I recommend this book highly.

Sridhar

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Kyurius Reader

Fakers review

May 3, 2009

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

I wish there was more on fake art and jewelry, and less on the written word.

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Timothy HaughTop Contributor: Baby

Why Con Men Con and Why We Fall For It

March 11, 2009

Format: Hardcover

In this relatively brief book, Mr. Maliszewski gives us stories of great confidence men, those who have convinced others of the truth of stories and the originality of art that, in the end, turns out to be a fabric of lies. He also purports to an analysis of why people perpetrate these fakes and why so many of us fall for them. After all, many of these fakes are not particularly good. In this, however, he is not quite as successful.

The stories he tells are, for the most part, fascinating ones both recent and not-so-recent. The story of James Frey and the over-the-top reaction to the outing of his less-than-true memoir was one in a spate of recent scandals--Stephen Glass, Michael Finkel, and "JT LeRoy"--that seemed to provide inspiration to Mr. Maliszewski. And yet, some of the best tales are the older ones: the story of life on the moon printed as fact in the New York Sun in 1835, Abraham Bredius's Vermeer fakes in the decades before World War II, and the poetry fakes in The New Republic in 1916 and in Australia during World War II. Faking is by no means new.

The reasons people produce fakes are a little more difficult to comprehend. Though no one comes out and says it, the main reason seems to be frustration--frustration that Bredius's own work doesn't sell, frustration that magazines print poems by other poets that are worse than yours, frustration that a newspaper wants a story by a deadline that can't be met in a style that the background doesn't provide. Even Mr. Maliszewski's (mostly tedious) stories of his own fake journalism simply indicate his frustration that his work wasn't being taken seriously enough.

Why people swallow fakes is more interesting and understandable. It seems to center around two aspects. First, the fake is layered in truth that can make it more difficult to spot. For example, the New York Sun's story was prefaced on the work of a real, famous astronomer who just happened to have no idea his name was being used to perpetrate a fraud. Second, and probably more importantly, we want to believe what we're told. The Vermeer fakes were believed because people desperately wanted them to be real. The same is true for almost all fake stories followed hook, line and sinker. Amazingly, people even want to believe stories they know in advance are fake. (See all people who believe what they see on TV and in the movies is real or Maliszewski's story of the "Great War of the Californias" paintings.)

We all like to believe we'd be able to spot a fake but we're all able to be suckered. This was brought home to me by one of the last stories in the book: Michael Chabon's "Golems I Have Known" lecture. In it, Chabon tells of meeting an author of one of his favorite books (Strangely Enough! by C.B. Colby) when he was a kid who turned out to be Joseph Adler, the author of an Holocaust memoir, which turned out to be a fake when the author was revealed to be Victor Fischer, a Nazi journalist. Now, I would have fallen for this because Colby is a real person and his book was also one of my favorites as a child. However, all the rest of it is completely fake. Why would I have fallen for it? Because there is something I know to be true--Colby's book--and, as a fan of Chabon, I want his story to be true. Scary, how easy we can be misled.

In the end, Maliszewski has chosen an interesting subject and done a fairly good job of giving us a taste of what it's all about. If there are some lapses in analysis and a rather narrow focus, that can be forgiven. He tells some very good stories.

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