Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert

As long as your brain's guess about the next word turns out to be right, turning black squiggles into ideas, scenes, characters, and concepts, blissfully unaware that your nexting brain is predicting the future of the sentence at a fantastic rate. It is only when your brain predicts badly that you suddenly feel avocado.
That is, surprised. See?

Human minds are weird. Half of what we perceive is fictionalized by our mind for us. Even the most logical of minds makes strange errors and creates story lines. Gilbert does an excellent job of pointing out the ways our minds fool, confuse and console us. He points to studies on happiness that indicate handicapped folks and former convicts show higher happiness and satisfaction ratings than the average able-bodied good citizen. Why? Is it that the worst has already happened to these folks and they have less to fear? Have they learned that bad things are surmountable? Are they merely lying to themselves? Why do people making $40,000 claim to be as happy or happier than people making $400,000? An fascinating and sometime unnerving book.

Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary - Traudl Junge - Ed. Melissa Muller

Like the accounts written by Hitler's best friend August "Gustl" Kubizek, Until the Final Hour shows the weirdly human side of Hitler. There is something so very disconcerting about the idea of a madman having friends, normal conversations, afternoon tea and all the other conventional trappings of everyday life. Of course, it stands to reason that despots have to have some charm and personality (faked or not) otherwise they wouldn't be able to rise as they do. Screaming, foaming madmen rarely control states if those are the only things they do. But still, my mind simply can't wrap around the image of HItler crawling around the floor of his office with a poker, trying to get his dog's bouncy ball out from under the furniture.

Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary for three years, recounts her life unraveling as she is pulled from a secretarial pool to become Hitler's personal secretary. At 22 she dreams of being a dancer but needs to make a living and working for the boss seems like an exciting adventure. From a midnight interview in a bunker in a forest, she follows her boss from the Wolf's Lair to the Berghof, to visit Mussolini and finally to the Berlin bunker.

Junge's book is based partly on an account she wrote after the war and partly on interviews she gave in the early 00s. A movie, Blind Spot, is an hour and a half of her recollections. Junge and her fellow secretaries lived in a "golden cage" - in the eye of the storm. While they often had ominous feelings they were so removed from real life, the war and factual news that they knew virtually nothing about what Hitler was up to. To them, he was a tired but kind boss who had a very stressful job. He was paternal and wanted only to talk about light topics when they had tea or dinner:

But that was not the end of the conversation. It looked as if Hitler wanted to say something more, and he seemed to be searching for the right words. Finally, he said, smiling at me and speaking almost awkwardly, that he knew I was still very young, there were so many men here, most of them seldom went home and - well, soldiers feel particularly strongly attracted to the Eternal Feminine - in short, I must be a little careful, not too forthcoming If I had any complaints of anyone pestering me, never mind who it was, I was to come and tell him about it, any time.

Only at the end when Junge ends up in the bunker in Berlin does she come to realize what sort of man she has been working for. Interspersed with her narrative are many comments about her shock, horror, grief and anger at herself for being so blind and complacent. She never asks for forgiveness, just tries to tell how it was as accurately as she can. Riveting.

Retro Hell - Life in the '70s and '80s, from Afros to Zotz - by the editors of ben is dead magazine and The Encyclopedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1,001 Things You Hate to Love - by Sam Stall, Lou Harry and Julie Spalding

These two tomes are wonderfully awful collections to dip into and read. Not surprisingly there is a great deal of cross-over between the two. Full of bizarre facts (Anne Rice's real name is Howard!), snarky commentary, "where are they now" stories and plenty of tidbits to jog snippets of nostalgia in your brain. Remember pop beads? OPI clothing? Scratch and sniff stickers? Love Dairy Queen, the musical Cats or Fabio? It's all here. Great fun, super tacky.

Pete and Pickles - Berkeley Breathed

I was kind of shocked when Breathed killed off Opus earlier this year. I understand his rationale that the world is really just too messed up for an Opus, no matter how feisty he is. However, I think Breathed did a great disservice by taking away a gently sarcastic bright spot in a cynical world. Regardless, he has partially redeemed himself with his gorgeous new children's book Pete and Pickles. Full of Breathed's luminous illustrations, Pete and Pickles tells the story of a quite little pig who spends his days tending his wife's grave. However, once he rescues an elephant named Pickles, his whole quiet life goes out the door. Lots of great images, some highly reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes, along with a very sweet story.
http://www.berkeleybreathed.com/images/BB_BG.jpg

Dictator Style - Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots - Peter York, forward by Douglas Coupland

It would seem that, out there somewhere, there is a checklist and letter that your average dictator is sent when they reach a certain level. "Yes," this letter says, "you may rule with an iron fist and have your every bloody whim met. But in return, you will have horrendous interior decorating taste." Right, let's see here:
Gilt and flocked wallpaper? Check
Dark European paintings? Check
French or English antiques (or knock-offs)? Check
Enormous, empty rooms with no purpose? Check
Stashes of stuff - shoes, furs, jewelry, more furniture? Check
Vast, ugly bathrooms? Check

Of course, not all dictators stick to the list. Some are quiet inventive. Saddam liked fantasy sci-fi art of the sort you pick up at fair booths - dragons, big-busted women, garish colors on velvet. Ceausescu had violet bathroom sinks. Hitler collected Dresden figurines. Whodathunk? Delightfully hideous!

Photography in Japan: 1853-1912 - Terry Bennett

The actual text of this book is dull beyond words. It chronicles the various European photographers who first photographed Japan, along with later European and japanese photographers and their studios. Yep, dull.

The images are magnificent. They show an exotic and beautiful world, now long gone. Narrow winding streets, geisha in full kimonos, castles with rice-paper windows and samurai in their mustached helmets are captured as their country is being engulfed by the west. Check out this marvelous website for some of the images: http://oldphotosjapan.com/en/