The Silent Brotherhood (book)

'''''The Silent Brotherhood: Inside America's Racist Underground''''' is a 1989 book by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt about the Order, a neo-Nazi group led by Robert Jay Mathews, their crimes, and the resulting investigation. Both authors were journalists for the Denver newspaper ''Rocky Mountain News'', and had started investigating the group in 1984, shortly after the Order's murder of the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. To research the book, the authors interviewed several members of the Order, law enforcement agents, and relatives and friends of those involved. It was first published in hardcover and paperback format in 1989 by The Free Press.

The book was a commercial success. It received a new paperback edition from Signet the next year under the title '''''The Silent Brotherhood: The Chilling Inside Story of America's Violent, Anti-Government Militia Movement''''', which was reissued again after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. After two failed attempts to adapt the book into a film in the 1990s, ''The Silent Brotherhood'' was adapted into the 2024 film ''The Order''. With the film's release, the book was republished in 2024 by Simon & Schuster as '''''The Order: Inside America's Racist Underground'''''.

The book received a generally positive reception, though some criticisms were levied about its writing style. It received praise from critics and academics for its information and research on the group, as well as its portrait of Mathews; several called it the most comprehensive or definitive book on the Order. Terrorism scholars Mark S. Hamm and Cécile Van de Voorde described it as "a book without peer" in the terrorism literature. Provided by Wikipedia