“…[an] enthralling and essential new study of our collective American love affair with pernicious and intractable moonshine … Bunk is a sort of book that comes along rarely: the encompassing survey of some vast realm of human activity, encyclopedic but also unapologetically subjective … a panorama, a rumination and a polemic at once, asks more of the reader. It delivers riches in return … represents instead a deliberate and even violent confrontation with our determination to locate a susceptibility to bunk elsewhere, whether in the deplorable past or merely in the deplorable other … his tone at times eccentric or amused…a reader’s feast, a shaggy, generous tome with a slim volume of devastating aphorisms lurking inside; it also shimmers with moments of brief personal testimony, glimpses of Young’s life as a poet, a family man and a black Ivy Leaguer.”
-Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times Book Review, November 14, 2017
