A work of investigative journalism that explores the surprising origins and hidden ramifications of an epic late 1960s hoax, perpetrated by cultural luminaries, including Victor Navasky and E.L. Doctorow.
An excellent new book. His 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.
Tinline’s book is an astute study of a fiction warped under its own weight ... But he lacks patience for the paranoid style in American politics ... Tinline, who is British, doesn’t quite know what to do about the softer side of America’s conspiracy dabbling—the way these theories express our collective frustration, our yearning for the unknowable, our bumptious camaraderie.
