Now Available in Paperback: The United States of Paranoia

The
paperback edition of The United States of Paranoia, my
history of American conspiracy folklore, comes out today. It
includes a new afterword on the post-Snowden era, so the book is
now both longer and cheaper, and it’s easier to carry
around too.

The reviewers have liked the book—and when I say “the
reviewers,” I mean pretty much all of them, at least as far as
newspapers and magazines and webzines and journals go. (You can
find some negative takes on
Amazon and
Goodreads, and I love this sour
tweet to death.) It’s enough to make a man suspect an unseen
hand is acting behind the scenes, pulling the critical community’s
strings. Some samples:

“a terrific, measured, objective study of one of
American culture’s most loaded topics” —Publishers
Weekly

“so many tasty morsels of historical marginalia that it nearly
bursts with weirdness” —The
Globe and Mail

“immensely entertaining” —The
Boston Globe

“lively and often witty…few readers are likely to get to the end
of the book without having cherished notions challenged” —Salon

“a thoroughly researched and completely readable look at infamous
and forgotten conspiracy theories and presumed cabals throughout
American history” —New
York Daily News

“It’s all too rare to come upon a writer willing to attack the
sacred cows of the right and left with equal amounts of
intelligence and flair. Walker is, thankfully, that kind of writer
and a tireless and thorough researcher to boot.” —Los
Angeles Times

“A lively, extremely interesting, and occasionally more than
slightly scary book.” —Booklist

Amazon named it one of the top 20
nonfiction books of 2013, and it made the Chicago
Tribune‘s year-end
best-books list too. A conspiracy theorist reviews it
here, and a conspiracy debunker reviews it
here. The book is also, I am informed, going to appear in the
background during an episode of CSI. Disappointingly, the
show assured me that “the person whose home it would be in is NOT
evil.”