Rating: 
Summary: When did you last get conned?
Review: This book was a lot better than I thought it would be when I picked it up.I expected it was just going to be a collection of old hoaxes,many of which I was probably somewhat aware of anyway.Such was not the case.This book is an overview of the whole world of hoaxes.First, there are all kinds of dodges,fakes,frauds,flimfam,humbug,imposture,jeu d'esprit,practical jokes,pranks,shams,and on and on.Boese explains all of them and this book collects them all under the umbrella of hoaxes.He starts the book off with a Gullibility Test and the reader is quickly convinced the world is full of this stuff and that we have heard a lot of it for so long that we assume it must be true.Boese tries to explain why people are so prone to believe hoaxes and does a pretty fair job of it.He follows the development of hoaxes from the Middle Ages to the present time.He shows how hoaxes have progressed along with the advance of all forms of communication ;from the early days of storytelling,books,photography,radio,TV,and now the World Wide Web.Maybe the one thing he may have missed is that one time when a hoaxer was tarred and feathered but now he gets off with a tap on the wrist;this must surly contribute the great explosion in hoaxes.He gives a good selection of hoaxes from over the years and of the various types of hoaxes.
For someone who really enjoys digging into hoaxes they'll find included a list of 111 books and other references,that will be a wonderful resource.
Along with all this, he tries to show us how we can look at an issue,and try to determine if a hoax is involved.He gave it a good try, but I'm not sure even he believes that there is any perfect defense against a well thought out and perpeturated hoax.
After reading this book the reader is bound to look at event with a totally different viewpoint.Maybe we will suspect when the masses swallow the hook,line and sinker.The reward will be in "I felt there was something wrong about that!"
If that wasn't enough ;Boese gives his Museum of Hoaxes Web site. I went to it, and it is terrific. This book is just an introduction to it.
Rating: 
Summary: Lightweight Intro to the World of Fakes
Review: "Museum of Hoaxes" is a relatively short book collecting some of the most infamous hoaxes of the past 2,000 years. Everything within is given a similar, cursory treatment. That would be acceptable if there were more illustrations; I was surprised to see just how few plates exist in a book dedicated to hoaxes. Without illustrations, many of the hoaxes (such as the Chess Machine) are difficult to fully comprehend. The result is as superficial as a Saturday morning noncredit course at a community college.
Still, I'm glad I bought the book. It *is* a fun read, and a good introduction to the world of hoaxing. I plan to lend it out to my students in order to encourage them to develop skeptical thinking. I expected more coming from the creator of the Museum of Hoaxes website, but the book succeeds within its own modest limits.
For an equally poppy but far more comprehensive look at a related area, check out "Too Good to be True" by Brunvand.
Rating:
Summary: Book Review: The Museum of Hoaxes
Review: Curator and author Alex Boese has the wide-eyed passion for discovering the curiosities in life and the scientific skepticism for finding the truth. Amazing, unusual tales from supermarket tabloids, television, and comic books thrilled you, as a naïve kid. You lacked experience in life and failed to recognize the motives of others. As you grew wiser, you learned to hunt for the misinformation that separates what is real and what is not real, especially when you became a fraud examiner. The thrill and the hunt are well preserved and on exhibit in The Museum of Hoaxes. Have you ever been fooled on April 1st? Do you know the name of the first female Pope? Did you ever hear a jackalope sing or a carrot whistle? Do you believe everything you read? Take the clever Gullibility Test before you start the museum tour. Mankind has been deceived for centuries. The museum displays sensational hoaxes chronologically to offer an entertaining history of lies even your kids will like. Curator Boese explains how outrageous hoaxes attract attention and shape public opinions about democracy, religion, science, and business. What you already know about many topics may not be the truth. Imaginative hoaxes involved Marco Polo, Benjamin Franklin, men on the moon, and Microsoft. Even Cassie Chadwick and Charles Ponzi, two "Frankensteins of Fraud," are immortalized in the museum. Find out how penny papers and Web sites caused financial disasters. After you devour the book, explore the museum's Web site at ... . New exhibits are added daily. Enjoy the BBC broadcast of Swiss workers harvesting the pasta crop from spaghetti trees. Established in 1997, The Museum of Hoaxes in San Diego attracts a million visitors a month. You'll want to visit more than once, and tell your friends. Admission prices: $$$ for paperback, 288 pages, November 2003, Plume Books, New York, ISBN 0452284651; and $$$ for hardcover, 304 pages, illustrated, November 2002, Dutton Books, New York, ISBN 0525946780. Available at local bookstores and online booksellers. Reviewed by Larry C. Adams, CFE, CPA, CIA, CISA, author of "Fraud In Other Words: Professional Jargon and Uncensored Street Slang."
Rating:
Summary: Not Enough of a Good Thing
Review: I enjoyed reading this book, but I found myself wishing that it had more hoaxes and less background information. I ended up skipping the first page or two of each chapter to get to the interesting stuff - and the hoaxes are interesting, and inspirational!
Rating:
Summary: Cursory Curiosities
Review: I have to admit to being simultaneously disappointed and entertained by Alex Boese's The Museum of Hoaxes. While Boese certainly has researched many pranks, stunts and deceptions and writes in a breezy style, I kept wishing for more information about the hoaxes he reports (not more hoaxes, of which there are plenty). Had I come across this book in a brick-and-mortar store, I probably would not have bought it; and I have to admit that the Amazon reviewer does comment about the lack of detail. For example, the section on The Great Chess Automaton is only two rather small pages long, with no pictures. Look on James Randi's (the Amazing Randi) website for the James Randi Educational Fountation, dedicated to debunking hoaxes, physics, and the like, and you'll find two commentaries dedicated to the same topic, with several drawings which make the hoax perfectly clear. Randi's account is much more engaging, as its detail brings the story to life. Boese discusses the Loch Ness Monster and the "surgeon's photo"--but doesn't include the photo itself. The book makes good light reading, and perhaps it's greatest good is as a testiment to the fact that the media is less in the news and education business than in the entertainment business, a case which Randi also makes repeatedly. You'll probably encounter a few stories you've heard before and not realised were hoaxes or outright frauds, such as the sightings of sea monsters by the passenger ship Mauretania--a report first published in the New York Times and repeated ad infinitum in books on Cryptozoology and Fortean Phenomena, but which has entirely no basis in fact. You'll surely discover things of which you've not heard--my favorite is "The Great Monkey Hoax" hailing from my home state of Georgia, wherein a dead Capuchin monkey was doused in depiliatory cream and left in the road by two boys who claimed they'd struck it while two other "aliens" escaped in a glowing UFO. Boese has a gullibilty test in his book, which I, a confirmed skeptic, didn't do well on. And a number of famous or otherwise interesting hoaxes didn't make it into his book--including Mother Shipton, the psychic more accurate than Nostradamus but who unfortunately didn't exist, or the mermaid story which took place here in Hong Kong less than 10 years ago--a report was widely circulated in the media that a fisherman had caught a mermaid and his boat was bringing her into port. People flocked to the docks, but the boat was delayed and wouldn't be in until the next day. Still people came, but of course, no mermaid ever showed up--I don't remember what the excuse was--I think perhaps he freed the mermaid because she'd threatened him with a curse. Or the monkey man that was running around rooftops in India, supposedly assulting people, also within the last decade. Boese maintains a website where at least some of these hoaxes are written up; but like the book that site lacks detail and seems somewhat flat.
Rating:
Summary: Cursory Curiosities
Review: I have to admit to being simultaneously disappointed and entertained by Alex Boese's The Museum of Hoaxes. While Boese certainly has researched many pranks, stunts and deceptions and writes in a breezy style, I kept wishing for more information about the hoaxes he reports (not more hoaxes, of which there are plenty). Had I come across this book in a brick-and-mortar store, I probably would not have bought it; and I have to admit that the Amazon reviewer does comment about the lack of detail. For example, the section on The Great Chess Automaton is only two rather small pages long, with no pictures. Look on James Randi's (the Amazing Randi) website for the James Randi Educational Fountation, dedicated to debunking hoaxes, physics, and the like, and you'll find two commentaries dedicated to the same topic, with several drawings which make the hoax perfectly clear. Randi's account is much more engaging, as its detail brings the story to life. Boese discusses the Loch Ness Monster and the "surgeon's photo"--but doesn't include the photo itself. The book makes good light reading, and perhaps it's greatest good is as a testiment to the fact that the media is less in the news and education business than in the entertainment business, a case which Randi also makes repeatedly. You'll probably encounter a few stories you've heard before and not realised were hoaxes or outright frauds, such as the sightings of sea monsters by the passenger ship Mauretania--a report first published in the New York Times and repeated ad infinitum in books on Cryptozoology and Fortean Phenomena, but which has entirely no basis in fact. You'll surely discover things of which you've not heard--my favorite is "The Great Monkey Hoax" hailing from my home state of Georgia, wherein a dead Capuchin monkey was doused in depiliatory cream and left in the road by two boys who claimed they'd struck it while two other "aliens" escaped in a glowing UFO. Boese has a gullibilty test in his book, which I, a confirmed skeptic, didn't do well on. And a number of famous or otherwise interesting hoaxes didn't make it into his book--including Mother Shipton, the psychic more accurate than Nostradamus but who unfortunately didn't exist, or the mermaid story which took place here in Hong Kong less than 10 years ago--a report was widely circulated in the media that a fisherman had caught a mermaid and his boat was bringing her into port. People flocked to the docks, but the boat was delayed and wouldn't be in until the next day. Still people came, but of course, no mermaid ever showed up--I don't remember what the excuse was--I think perhaps he freed the mermaid because she'd threatened him with a curse. Or the monkey man that was running around rooftops in India, supposedly assulting people, also within the last decade. Boese maintains a website where at least some of these hoaxes are written up; but like the book that site lacks detail and seems somewhat flat.
Rating:
Summary: Marvelous and astounding!
Review: I've been waiting for this book, and now I'm delighted to have "The Museum of Hoaxes" to take with me everywhere. This is a wonderful collection of hoax stories from the Middle Ages to the Internet era, each an illustration of clever prankstering -- or astonishing gullibility. Well-written and easy to read at a page or two each, these hoaxes sometimes crack me up, sometimes make me feel smugly superior, and sometimes leave me afraid that I will soon get hoaxed myself. When I'm reading, I often find myself wanting to tell somebody about one of the incredible stories I've just found. Because the Museum is so comprehensive and thorough, there's almost a feeling of something useful about the knowledge I've acquired, all this trivia about centuries of hoaxes. It's just enough to make the pleasure entirely guiltless. This book is fabulous -- and that's no hoax!
Rating: 
Summary: Does this Book Exist or is This Just an Amazon Hoax?
Review: No this is not a hoax by Amazon, this book actually does exist and inside you'll find various hoaxes that have fooled governments, populations at large, journalists, internet users and well anyone who can be fooled. The more recent ones such as the photo of the guy on top of the World Trade Centre with an American Airlines plane in the background you will no doubt have seen before but it is great to see how those hoaxes started and how many people they fooled. Some of the older hoaxes you may also have heard of as they have become legendary but there are heaps of them in here so it is doubtful you will have known them all. This book also contains photographs (not colour) of hoax photographs and other illustrations. It is a good interesting read and covers the entire globe not just the USA like other similar books.
Rating:
Summary: Museum of Hoaxes
Review: On the first pages of this book you get to take a test - a gullibility test, to see which things you would believe and which ones you wouldn't; and some of them are true, then rest are merely hoaxes.
Most of the hoaxes going around today aren't nearly as interesting or big as those that have happened in previous centuries. I, for one, know that there are a lot of computer hoaxes sent along e-mail 'trains' that I've gotten and just laughed at. But the things people would believe - actually, many still will believe!
In this extraordinary book, you get to learn about
'Princess Caraboo', the girl who pretended to be a princess who could speak no known language.
Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster, who has a few good hoaxes made about her.
There was a man, after World War 1, who was in jail for 12 years, and he came out and made a big show of it, saying he had been a prisoner of the French.
Esio Trot - all right, so maybe not, but there was a student living above a middle-aged woman in a shop, and right under her window she kept a turtle in a tank. The student bought a bunch of turtles, each slightly larger than the other, then each day took a hook, pulled out the turtle in the tank, and replaced it with a bigger one. And then he reversed it and started putting smaller ones.
Have you ever heard about Charles Ponzi? You should have. He told people that if they gave him money, he would give them twice that back. People were, of course, flocking to do this after the first few people got twice their money back. But it was soon figured out that he only gave them the money back because he had an ever-lasting line of people willing to give him large amounts of money. When this happened, people stopped and this caused Ponzi's whole scheme to go wrong and he spent five years in jail. This type of hoax has since then been known as the Ponzi hoax.
You also get to read about the Cottingley Fairies; two cousins cut out drawings of fairies from a book, placed them with hat pins, and then took pictures of them and told the world that faeries were real.
So all in all, this book has many funny and facinating hoaxes and is well worth getting and reading.
Rating:
Summary: You'll be surprised by what you don't know
Review: So are you one of those many people, like I was, who believed the old rumor about subliminal advertising? You know, the one where a group of researchers added a few clever lines like "Hungry? Candy and Popcorn at the Concession" to be flashed during a movie so quickly the conscious mind missed it but the subconscious caught it and the concession stand sold 50% more candy and popcorn. I believed it quite completely for many years, until Alex Boese, our esteemed curator for this Museum of Hoaxes, informed me it was complete hooey. Turns out a researcher did indeed claim to do this and it caused quite a stir 40 years ago, but when scientific colleagues pressed him to reproduce this effect in a more controlled setting, he could not. And, to this day, the receipt of subliminal messages remains unproven. Interesting stuff, isn't it? You'll be surprised at all the things you thought you knew. Its well written and a page turner, in fact, I tore through this book in less than a day, I simply could not put it down, much to the annoyance of my pretty wife.
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