Fooled You!: Fakes and Hoaxes Through the Years
Grade 4-6–Pascoe employs a light tone to describe 11 pranks and frauds perpetrated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of the stories will be familiar to fans of historical oddities. The Fejee Mermaid, the Cardiff Giant, the Piltdown Man, fairy photographs, Bigfoot, and crop circles have been the subjects of similar works, such as Alex Boese'sThe Museum of Hoaxes(Penguin, 2003) and Judith Herbst'sHoaxes(Lerner, 2004). Like other volumes on this subject, this one includes a few lesser-known items including theNew York Sun'sreport of the first East to West Atlantic balloon crossing in 1844, a report submitted by a struggling journalist named Edgar Allan Poe. What is not as common in other works on the topic are the clear explanations of who thought of the hoaxes and how and why they developed them. A list of six similar titles from the 1990s and another of nine Web sites that track current hoaxes or describe historical ones are appended. Keller's silly cartoon illustrations help maintain a light tone. Entertainment that encourages healthy skepticism makes this title a winner.–Ann G. Brouse, Steele Memorial Library, Elmira, NYCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.