A couple more books

I was going to post about dealing with my mum’s old photos and health issues, but I think it’ll take more time to draft than I have, so …
MISTAKES WERE MADE (But Not By Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, argues that much of our irrational behavior is an effort to remove cognitive dissonance and avoid feeling bad about ourselves: If we lied to put the perp in jail, he was definitely guilty so there’s no harm done; if we cheated on our spouse, it didn’t really count; if we commit war crimes they really had it coming, and so on. Unfortunately, most of this I’ve heard before—I’d like it better if the authors devoted more time to explaining why some people can beat dissonance, either my accepting they screwed up and atoning or simply ignoring the guilt and forging ahead. At one point, for example, they admit it’s remarkable, given the ease of developing bigotry against a Not Us group, that so many people aren’t prejudiced against blacks (or Jews, or gays, etc.), but they don’t look into the question any deeper than that.
DONALD DUCK: Lost in the Andes collects some of Carl Barks’ Disney comic-strips, as Donald hunts the Andes for a source of square eggs, battles a witch trying to extinguish the Christmas spirit and tries to rescue his uncle from captivity in the South Seas, with Huey, Dewey and Louie in tow, of course. While I know Barks is highly regarded, he’s something of a dog-whistle for me—it’s not that I think he’s bad, but his work is pitched at a frequency I just don’t seem to pick up. So this didn’t really work for me.
WITCHFINDER: Lost and Gone Forever by John Arcudi, Mike Mignola and John Severin has Sir Edward Grey (a 19th century witch-hunter in the Hellboy universe) travel to the Wild West to hunt down a missing man, only to find himself dealing with a sorceress raising an Indian army (not to mention raising zombies and stone dogs). This is one of the weaker Hellboy-related entries—not bad, but fairly generic—as a frontier scout gets most of the action, this might as well have been an issue of DC’s Weird Western (in the endnotes, Arcudi admits the genesis was the desire to do a Western in the Hellboy series, so I’m not far off)
THE KRYPTON COMPANION by Michael Eure is an excellent look at the Man of Steel under editors Mort Weisinger and Julius Schwartz up through the present. This is very heavy on discussions of the art, particularly Curt Swan (who’s almost universally revered) and Neal Adams (who counts Superman vs. Muhammed Ali as a personal favorite, partly because of his respect for Ali sticking it to the man) and more mixed reviews of Kirby’s work on Jimmy Olsen. There’s also discussions with most of the key writers, lengthy discussions of the various changes and reboots through the years and more discussion of what makes Superman work, or not work. A good read.