Ghosts of Iron Mountain, by Phil Tinline (Scribner). In 1967, a top-secret government report stating that achieving peace “would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society” was leaked. The document was a hoax—the work of a political satirist—but, as Tinline shows in this riveting history, it was taken seriously by numerous news outlets and by readers, even after it was exposed as a sham five years later. Delving into the circumstances that primed the American public to believe that shadowy élites at the heart of the federal government were conspiring against them, Tinline traces how the report helped fuel various conspiracy theories over the coming decades, from the “CIA plot” to assassinate John F. Kennedy to the rise of QAnon.

Turning to Birds, by Lili Taylor (Crown). Some fifteen years ago, Taylor, while upstate on an “emotional sabbatical” from her acting career, discovered birds. What she noticed first were the many and varied sounds these “flying dinosaurs” make. “During that time of personal quiet,” she writes, “I entered a world of sound outside myself—and I’ve never left.” Embracing the startlingly intense subculture of birding, Taylor attends festivals, makes pilgrimages to places like “the Warbler Capital of the World” (northwestern Ohio), and savors the consciousness-altering power of “bins,” the birder term for binoculars: they “facilitate an experience outside reality. I don’t do drugs; I do bins.” By turns introspective, inquisitive, and funny, the book is a love letter to nature and the solace it can provide.

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