Object Lessons is my favorite new series. Every one of them that I've read has been awesome, and I'm definitely looking forward to reading more!

Fake by Kati Stevens is about fakeness and replicas and impersonators and forgeries and prsothetics.

This is a short, simple, sometimes fun book about the concept of ‘fake.’ The author traces different cultural aspects of fakes (art, plastic surgery, etc.) that are interesting. But the meat of the book spends time on the idea of fakeness as humans in our relationships to others and even to ourselves. This is an interesting, quick read.

This is the second book in this series i've read and I enjoyed it so much more than the first. The concept of what is fake and how we as humans can interact with it is an interesting point. Stevens' clearly and precisely Covers and discusses this and, the way she handles it is in a way everyone can understand it.

This is one of those books that is intriguing when you see it and has you anxious to start reading. However, this is also one of those books that doesn't meet the expectations you have for it. Brilliant concept, not so brilliant execution.

Free early reviewer book. An extended musing on the concept of “fakeness,” mostly taking the position that there’s nothing wrong with fake things that aren’t frauds. Replicas in museums, for example, don’t bother her; they serve conservation goals by allowing current publics to experience artifacts/fossils without letting the real things deteriorate. And body alteration is fine and just as real as anything else; she points out that “Baudrillard [with his criticism of the unreal] would be a terrible person for anyone with a prosthetic to encounter.” Prosthesis, Stevens contends, is “already humanoid. The prosthesis’s entire reason for being is to service the body ….” Contradictions are everywhere: “If man is made in the image of God … Man is the first cheap knockoff.” Stevens gets self-contradictory in arguing that virtual reality would seem as creepy as cloning if we hadn’t encountered it first as/in entertainment, even though (a) we encountered cloning there too, and (b) she then argues that clones and robots are scary because “we have met ourselves, and there is no reason to think anything made in our image would be better than us,” which doesn’t apply to virtual landscapes. Stevens also is a fan of sex workers and sex tosy: “by demanding nothing of the customer but legal tender, their so-called ‘inauthenticity’ allows the customer to be himself, to be authentic. He does not have to cyborg himself, try to trick the prostitute or phallus into fucking or loving him—he has paid with cash instead of his identity.” That seems to undervalue the role of power and the differences between using a sex toy and hiring a sex worker. Stevens doesn’t like faked orgasms, though; unlike other proxies for body parts or relationships, they aren’t honest about their limits/un-“real”ness. Fake orgasms are frauds. But she insists that, in the era of Trump, it’s important to remember that good v. bad, real v. fake, and what I like v. what I don’t like aren’t synonymous.

This is the second of the Object Lessons series that I have read, and it cemented my feeling that I would like to read more of them. The series is comprised of short books that focus on “the hidden lives of ordinary things.” So far, my perception is that they present an unexpected viewpoint on things we think we know about already.

This particular entry in the series is about “fake” things, and ranges from architecture that is designed in an historic style, through prosthetics, sex dolls and fake news. Each chapter focused on one type of fake, and examined historic and current beliefs about that issue, along with the author's own thoughts.

I enjoyed each individual chapter, and felt as if the author's points were well-researched and argued; however I found the book less successful as an overarching discussion of fakery. To me, it felt as if each topic was selected because there was some element within that topic that was called “fake,” but that there was not a strong throughline between the chapters otherwise. And that lack of a stronger thematic connection left me slightly less satisfied with the book as a whole.

I really liked how this book started off, historical context to George W. Bush's "Freedom Fries", and exploring the role of a painting vs. the artistic experience in what the museum provides. There were some interesting parallels to the Rolf Potts' book on souvenirs, also in this series.

Addressing whether a product that does what it says it will can be called "fake", i.e.. knockoff designer handbags, and as someone who reads a lot of healthy food writing, I enjoyed her analysis of so called fake foods, although I'm pretty sure I'll never eat an oreo again. I missed the controversy of a few years ago of "faux fur" being found to be real animal product, so I enjoyed reading about that.

However I feel as if it went on too long-as if she had some mandatory minimum word count that she needed to hit. She even admitted she was getting too long winded on some items. So perhaps it could have been a little tighter or shorter.

Like so many other reviewers, I was highly intrigued by the concept but a bit disappointed by the execution... Honestly, even though it was short, it felt like it was too long - it rambled on a bit, like a speech or essay that ran over time. Stevens' writing is fine, if a bit rant-like at times. I understand how that happens - she clearly feels very strongly about the (I agree) mistaken conflation of fake/false/ersatz/etc., and those feelings come through loud and clear (and are, I think, important in that they offer an important perspective that is increasingly being lost in the laxity of language that seems to be sweeping the world. But those feelings occasionally left the reading less clear and straightforward than I expected - or than I found to be helpful. Frankly they lost me a bit, and a couple of times I almost put the book down and didn't pick it back up. I stuck with it though, because there are some moments of spot-on encapsulation of dangerous trends in language that are threatening spillover (I think) into the cultural and political zeitgeist. It was a worthwhile read and addition to popular cultural analysis, I just wish it had been a tad more evenly presented...

Stevens tackles an everyday object concept--fakes. As always, the conversation is wide ranging and provocative--kosher rules and non-dairy creamers, prosthetic limbs, celebrity impersonators and wax figures at Madame Tussaud's (especially if they're impersonating the person in a role), reproductions of famous artworks as souvenirs (all the magnetic Mona Lisas), faux fur and forgeries.

Oh, how retro. This is a book that concerns the fake, and takes an age to put the word "news" after that. So while the rest of the world is declaring half the Internet to be entirely true, verifiable, and in agreement with what we want to believe, and the other half pernicious, untrustworthy, Russia-generated evil, these pages go back to concern themselves with other artificial, ersatz, improper things. Consider fur – fake fur only exists because real fur animals became so rare through hunting nobody could afford the real thing. But nowadays some fake fur can try and get away with having real fur in it – and through animal-friendly conscience, we turn our noses up at it and demand the real fake thing. Food can be fake – or can it? Us in the UK will remember Iceland and other supermarket chains selling burgers with horsemeat in them, that many would deride as fake. That's not true – they were burgers, and meat, all along. Having said that, in response to the very good chapter here about whether museums should dare deign to show reconstructions of their art and artefacts, I would posit that the London Bridge in America is a fake – it's been rebuilt since the idiot bought it, and it doesn't – nay, can't – have the same purpose as it used to do, to the extent it cannot convey people across water in LONDON. Fake cave artwork, artificial versions of priceless things, are real, but that, minus the context, is a fake bridge.

Still, once every two years I have to wonder if I am a fake – or at least a fraud. I used to have 20/20 vision and better, and still have 20/20 vision and better – but through glasses. In my ignorance, I am left to wonder if I am not seeing better than I ever did see, through artificial means. Is my visual sense's power defrauding my mind and others by unreal enhancement? You can enlarge that up to the subject here, of prosthetics, which never actually asks whether a man with a fake arm that can lift more weights than he could with his real arm is or is not a fake, but should do.

In fact the book does do a lot that I never expected it to – on at least two occasions it brings ecology into the argument, and posits a situation where we need the fake places that are all we're left with in such a way you feel like you're in a J G Ballard sci-fi. But it doesn't do what I expected. I am used to the netgalley proof of this series not telling us anything of the authors, and here, as the book devolves into a belated look at the post-modern body, the post-modern relationship etc, I take that to be her main professorial concern. But that science nous prevents her from ever mentioning the alleged fake, such as the Apollo programmes, all the while looking at bits of the actual crafts involved.

I've seen books in this series be wondrous and brilliant for giving us the unexpectedly readable about the unexpected subject. I've seen books in this series that needed pulping for their blatant attempt at getting into Pseud's Corner. This one does give us the readable, and the unexpected, but with less wonder. Still, I certainly don't regret reading it – and that's the real verdict.

Many pages to long. Was a bit boring , even though I was interested to read this book.
Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free, it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.