Summer Reading 2025: Home

Lies destroy. Disinformation tears at the fabric of democracy. A Firehose of Falsehood: The Story of Disinformation breaks down disinformation tactics and offers tools for defending and restoring truth. From Darius I of ancient Persia (522-486 BCE), to blood libel of the Middle Ages, to Soviet disinformation tactics and modern election deniers, Teri Kanefield and Pat Dorian show how tyrants and would-be tyrants deploy disinformation to gain power. Democracy, which draws its authority from laws instead of the whim of a tyrant, requires truth. For a democracy to survive, its citizens must preserve and defend truth. Now that the Internet has turned what was once a trickle of lies into a firehose, the challenge of holding on to truth has never been greater. A Firehose of Falsehood offers readers these necessary tools.

These days, hardly any photographer dares to take pictures in the streets of Europe in the tradition of classic street photography without consulting with a lawyer. Time and again, however, Michael Dressel still does it. In his adopted home town of Los Angeles he looks at what most of us choose to ignore. Through the lens of his camera he encounters the people in the streets of Los Angeles. They know that they are being photographed. Each portrait and each scene reveals much about their fate and about the city they live in. But the photographs also say something about the photographer himself who documents his city's inhabitants with an unforgiving, yet empathetic gaze. The pictures' harsh black and white tones reflect the true reality of Los Angeles, where most dream of making it big, yet only very few succeed.

What could seem less inviting than summer in the desert? For most people, this prospect conjures up the image of relentless heat and parched earth; for biologist John Alcock, summer in Arizona's Sonoran Desert represents an opportunity to investigate the wide variety of life that flourishes in one of the most extreme environments in North America.

In the endless light of summer days, and the magical gloaming of the wee small hours, nature in Jim's beloved Highlands, Perthshire and Trossachs heartlands is burgeoning freely, as though there is one long midsummer's eve, nothing reserved. For our flora and fauna, for the very land itself, this is the time of extravagant growth, flowering and the promise of fruit and the harvest to come. But despite the abundance, as Jim Crumley attests, summer in the Northlands is no Wordsworthian idyll.