Fakes, Frauds, and F*ckers-A History of History's Greatest Liars

*Fakes, Frauds, and F*ckers* is a rollicking, unflinching tour through thirty-one of history's greatest liars: the impostors, hoaxers, forgers, and swindlers who convinced kings, scientists, bankers, and entire nations to believe things that were never true. Along the way you'll meet the insurance man who built his own Stonehenge, the forger who fooled the Nazis with a fake Vermeer, the "Great Impostor" who performed real surgery on real patients with zero medical training, and the two women who started the Spiritualism movement with nothing but cracked toe joints and an apple on a string. This isn't just a catalogue of clever tricks. It's a book about *why* people believe - about the specific hungers, blind spots, and institutional egos that let a five-ton block of carved gypsum pass for a petrified giant, or let a small-time East German memorabilia dealer convince a major news magazine he'd found Hitler's private diaries. Some of these stories are darkly funny. A few are genuinely harrowing - the exploitation behind P.T. Barnum's early career, the humanitarian catastrophe of a fake country sold to real settlers. All of them are true, or as true as a book about liars can promise to be. Written in the same myth-correcting spirit as the great con-artist collections of decades past, updated with cases as recent as the 1990s, *Fakes, Frauds, and Fuckers* is for anyone who's ever wondered how, exactly, so many smart people got taken in - and what that says about the rest of us.