Fooled You!: Fakes and Hoaxes Through the Years - Hardcover

Pascoe, Elaine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805075283 ISBN 13: 9780805075281

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), 2005

Synopsis

Hoaxes are meant to fool the world―and some people fall for them. Would you?

Crop circles. Aliens on earth. Fairies caught on film. Giant cats. What do these phenomena have in common? They are all hoaxes. Elaine Pascoe presents well-researched chapters on nearly a dozen infamous hoaxes―from the 1800s to the present―exploring the stories behind them (how they came to be as well as who instigated them) and pondering why people were so easily fooled. These tantalizing accounts hold tremendous appeal for all ages and are as much about the craftiness of perpetrators as about the gullibility of believers. Would you have been fooled? You'll just have to read Fooled You! to find out.

About this title

About the Author:

Elaine Pascoe has written many nonfiction books for young readers and has worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and editor. She lives in Connecticut.

Laurie Keller is the acclaimed author-illustrator of Do Unto Otters, Arnie, the Doughnut, The Scrambled States of America, and Open Wide: Tooth School Inside, among numerous other books for children. She earned a B.F.A. at Kendall College of Art and Design. She lives in Michigan, in a little cottage in the woods on the shore of Lake Michigan.

From School Library Journal:

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's The Museum of Hoaxes (Penguin, 2003) and Judith Herbst's Hoaxes (Lerner, 2004). Like other volumes on this subject, this one includes a few lesser-known items including the New York Sun's report 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, NY
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About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0805075283
• ISBN 13: 9780805075281
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96
• Illustrator: Keller Laurie