I'm So Happy

This photo album is a clever, tongue-in-cheek salute to kitsch of recent times, from the Eisenhower era to the present. A collage culled by Heiferman (coauthor of Still Life ) and Kismaric ( Forced Out: The Agony of the Refugee in Our Time ) from a mass of advertising and magazine journalism displays the indefatigable confidence of optimistic, die-hard American consumers in things . Shag bedspreads here offer a version of nirvana that will make some quail; well-wrought media images (of the laundry detergent Cheer, for example) seem invincibly persuasive, the real product rather than a mere picture of it; and money, plainly, is everything in this superabundant land. In this fantasy volume of American presidents grinning, American Dustbusters gaily conquering grit, and American crocuses burgeoning against ersatz sunsets, readers will find a life they either hated or loved, hallucinated or tried to forget. (May)