Genuine Fakes: How Phony Things Teach Us About Real Stuff

Historian Pyne (Seven Skeletons) offers a thoughtful examination of what it is to be fake, using case studies ranging from instances of outright deception to clearly labeled recreations, with plenty of gray area in between. In the process, she raises a host of provocative questions, not least of which is this: can a replica be good or authentic, or can it even “stand in for the genuine thing?” For example, Pyne notes that many modern artificial food flavors are chemically and structurally identical to their natural equivalents. Elsewhere, she demonstrates the utility of fakes by pointing to the painstaking recreation of France’s Chauvet Cave, in which Paleolithic paintings were found, in order to preserve the actual site as it was. Pyne doesn’t neglect instances of outright deception, such as by prolific 18th-century Shakespearean forger William Henry Ireland, who made his fake documents, letters, and plays more convincing by spelling Shakespeare’s name inconsistently, just as the Bard did himself. Thanks to this and plenty of other odd and intriguing facts—such as that synthetic banana flavoring was codified in the late 19th century and thus mimics a now-extinct variety of the fruit—Pyne’s well-written survey illuminates the ramifications of various types of fakery, even while showing how murky the concept of what is fake can get. (Oct.)