Ghosts of Iron Mountain
The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals about America Today
Published on 25. March 2025
Book
Hardback
352 pages
978-1-6680-5049-1 (ISBN)
Description
"Delve into the labyrinth of America's conspiracy culture with this investigative [work] that unearths the roots of our era's most potent myths. In 1966, amid unrest over the Vietnam War and the alarming growth of the military-industrial complex, little-known writer Leonard Lewin was approached by a group of ... satirists on the Left to concoct a document that would pretend to ratify everyone's fears that the government was deceiving the public. Devoting more than a year to the project, Lewin constructed a fiction ... that a government-run Study Group had been charged with examining the 'cost of peace,' setting its first meetings in the very real Iron Mountain nuclear bunker in upstate New York. ... In Lewin's telling, this gathering of the nation's academic elite concluded that suspending war would be disastrous, forcing all sorts of bizarre measures to compensate. ... What fascinates about Phil Tinline's revelation-filled recreation of that ... hoax is seeing how it explodes into America's consciousness, dominates media reports, and sends government officials scrambling. And then, subsequently, how Lewin's fabrication is adopted by a seemingly endless string of extremist organizations which view it as supporting their ideology"
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Simon & Schuster
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 233 mm
Width: 154 mm
Thickness: 33 mm
Weight
508 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-6680-5049-1 (9781668050491)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Phil Tinline
Ghosts of Iron Mountain
The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today
E-Book
03/2025
Scribner
€14.83
Available for download
Persons
Phil Tinline is a freelance writer and documentarian. He is the author of The Death of Consensus, which was chosen as The Times (London)’s Politics Book of the Year. Over the course of twenty years working for the BBC, he has made and presented many acclaimed documentaries about how political history shapes our lives. He has also written for The Times (London), The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph (London), The New Statesman (UK), BBC History Magazine, and Prospect. A graduate of Oxford University where he obtained a degree in English language and literature, he lives in London.
Kai Bird is an acclaimed biographer and journalist. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award–winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer. Bird is Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.
Kai Bird is an acclaimed biographer and journalist. With Martin J. Sherwin, he won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which was the inspiration for Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award–winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer. Bird is Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. He has won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Duff Cooper Prize for History and is the recipient of numerous fellowships. His work includes critical writings on the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He is an elected member of the prestigious Society of American Historians.