"An excellent new book.Tinline''s fast-paced account is often entertaining but never loses sight of where it is heading: toward a moment, our own, when conspiracists and crackpots have seized the levers of power.Both important and unsettling." -- New York Times "Tinline is a brilliant researcher and writer [and] Ghosts of Iron Mountain is the best kind of modern history: deeply researched, entertainingly written, piercingly perceptive.[it''s] essential reading for students of modern history and public perception, a rich survey of how we got to the point where practically every event or phenomenon is instantly decried as a ''false flag.''" -- New York Post "[How] a 1960s hoax by liberal luminaries including E. L. Doctorow fueled the conspiracy theories that Trump has relied on his entire political career.
A New York Times obituary for [hoax participant] Lewin, who died in 1999, called Report from Iron Mountain ''the hoax that would not die.'' But, as Tinline shows in Ghosts of Iron Mountain , they didn''t know the half of it. ''the Iron Mountain affair'' is particularly fascinating case study." -- Airmail "A thoughtful, engrossing, and highly readable history. Ghosts of Iron Mountain does not merely relate how the prank was hatched, executed, and received; it explores the hoax''s afterlife, as the document was rediscovered by people who didn''t watch that saga unfold in real-time.Tinline tells us, we have good cause to be wary of powerful people. But we also have good cause to be suspicious of documents that just happen to seem to confirm our worst suspicions." -- Reason magazine "An astute study of a fiction warped under its own weight.
" -- Harper''s Magazine "[How] a zany ''60s leftist hoax became a progenitor of Trumpism.[This] account of a jest gone terribly wrong makes for fascinating--and eye-opening--reading." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Diligently traced.Tinline offers nothing less than an alternative history of the late twentieth century, in which an off-beat satire ends up perpetuating the ''paranoid style'' of American politics." -- Booklist (starred) "DEEPLY REPORTED AND BRILLIANTLY TOLD.What a fascinating tale Phil Tinline unspools here. He''s unearthed a strange, little-known key from the 1960s with which he unlocks America''s descent into conspiracy madness and the dangerous blurring of political fiction and reality. Ghosts of Iron Mountain is unique, illuminating, and important.
" --Kurt Andersen, cofounder of Spy magazine and New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland and Evil Geniuses "ASTONISHING.an account of a brilliantly conceived spoof that has quite unintentionally changed the course of history." --from the Foreword by Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of American Prometheus, inspiration for the film Oppenheimer "A TREMENDOUS JOURNALISTIC ACHIEVEMENT, A ROLLICKING PAGE TURNER, AND, ULTIMATELY, A PUBLIC SERVICE.Tinline provides the ''why'' behind today''s most destabilizing extremist conspiracy theories." --Gerald Posner, author of the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK "SPELLBINDING, A PROFOUND MEDITATION on a question that America has never figured out quite how to face: can government, for, by, and of the people ever live comfortably side by side with military empire?" --Rick Perlstein, author of the New York Times bestseller Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America "A CLEVER, FAST-PACED READ OF DAZZLING ORIGINALITY that ranges from the Kennedy assassination to QAnon. In his gripping investigation Phil Tinline shows why Americans are so vulnerable to conspiracy theories and sinister hoaxes." --William I. Hitchcock, New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Eisenhower "A SUPERB WORK OF JOURNALISM, HISTORY, AND POLITICAL INSIGHT, a brilliant true story about a brilliant fake story.
We must all give thanks to Phil Tinline for exposing this conspiracy of conspiracies, this scheme of schemes--a story so good that, once you see it, you see it everywhere." --Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness "THOUGHTFUL, PROVOCATIVE, UNIQUE, AND SMART are just a few of the adjectives that describe Phil Tinline''s engrossing and highly readable Ghosts of Iron Mountain. You have to read this book to understand the roots of Trumpism in America today." --Steven M. Gillon, author of America''s Reluctant Prince and 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America "A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED HISTORY written in prose that has the acid kick of a well-mixed gimlet." --Rana Mitter, ST Lee Chair in U.S.-China Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Forgotten Ally: China''s World War II, 1937-1945 "A GRIPPING, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN, REAL-LIFE HISTORICAL THRILLER.
Rollercoastering from past to present, Ghosts of Iron Mountain reveals why many among us clutch at yarns about evil cabals and shadowy powerbrokers." --Brian Klaas, Contributing Writer at The Atlantic and author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters "PERSPECTIVE SHIFTING. Ghosts of Iron Mountain tells a story that subverts expectations of a perfectly polarized leftwing and rightwing mindset in the US." --Whitney Phillips, coauthor of The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed US Religion, Media, and Politics "A PAGE-TURNING, RIPPING GOOD READ.It is, in fact, a true story about us, our beliefs and fears, our political choices, and our paranoia about power. Read it and be awakened." --Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and author of Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational "DEEPLY INSIGHTFUL.A masterly account of how post-World War II America succumbed to a paranoia that still has many of its citizens chasing extremes.
" --James Ball, author of Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World "PACEY AND ENGAGING.Tinline retells the story of the hoax government study that declared permanent war indispensable to societal stability.Both the immediate response to the Report and its enduring legacy reveal the extent of Americans'' suspicions of and alienation from their government and help make sense of the apparent insanity of QAnon and other deep-state conspiracy theories." --Laura Beers, author of Orwell''s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century "UNPUTDOWNABLE. This superb story of a runaway hoax peels back like an onion. By the time you get to the deepest layer, everything you thought you knew about politics is transformed." --Bradley Garrett, author of Bunker: What It Takes to Survive the Apocalypse.