Who's your favourite baseball player?

THE FIRM: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE STASI
Gary Bruce
If Hannah Arendt hadn’t already coined totalitarianism’s epitaph—the banality of evil—Bruce, a historian at the University of Waterloo, could have said as much. He makes it clear there is good reason why East Germany was the most stable of the U.S.S.R.’s satellites: just about everyone in the country was in on its maintenance. The ruling regime established the most extensive police state in human history: one Stasi (secret police) officer for every 186 inhabitants (a ratio that dwarfs even Stalin’s enforcers during the Soviet Great Terror of the 1930s), and 200,000 informants at any given time. By some reckonings, when all the casual informants are included, the total reaches one informer for every seven East Germans. And when the regime crumbled, along with the Berlin Wall, in November 1989, the Stasi possessed approximately 180 km of shelved archives. Terrified Stasi officers started taking files from their offices to shredders, to the coal furnaces in their basements, to forests and rivers for disposal. In early December, all around the country, as smoke poured from Stasi offices, local citizens stormed them and stopped the destruction. Later, the Stasi archives have become the most open secret police files ever known, and five million people have applied for a look at their own.

Bruce examines the Stasi in action by concentrating on two small rural districts north of Berlin, and by utilizing not only the masses of archival resources but interviews with former Stasi officers, some still ideological devotees and others who had clearly always been opportunists interested in perks, pay and power. In many ways The Firm tells a dispiriting story about repression and, worse, accommodation with repression: the sheer number of informants has led some to mordantly call East Germany a “participatory dictatorship.” There is one powerful optimistic note in it, though; as Bruce points out to those who put their hopes for safety in mushrooming surveillance cameras—they don’t work. The most security-mad state in history still collapsed in a heap.
- BRIAN BETHUNE

WHAT WOMEN WANT:THE GLOBAL MARKET TURNS FEMALE FRIENDLY
Paco Underhill
If sitcoms are to be believed, men the world over know it’s in their best interests to keep women happy. Retailers, though, still have some learning to do, according to marketing expert Underhill. As more and more women bring home—and spend—more and more bacon, their preferences and expectations are reshaping the retail landscape—how, where and what we buy. Ignore that fact, Underhill warns retailers, and risk having more than half of your customers walk out the door.

With a “bald, aging retail wonk” as our cheerful and chatty guide, What Women Want takes us on a tour through a home, a hotel and a series of retail stores. Facts come “tumbling out” of Underhill (as Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the 1996 New Yorker profile that jump-started Underhill’s ascendancy to guru status). He also tosses snippets of social history and the odd personal anecdote into the mix to keep the tour engaging.

So what do women want? (It’s not as simple, or as insulting, as a pink car.) Women want cleanliness, says Underhill. Control. Safety. And a dash of consideration. In hotels, women’s desire for cleanliness has led to the bowed shower curtain rod (so the gunky curtain doesn’t end up plastered against your body). And as more women travel solo, hotel clerks have been trained not to shout out a guest’s name and room number, but to discreetly press a labelled key card into her hand—safer for women and men. The kitchen is now a family’s “multi-focus command centre,” and has become women’s equivalent of men’s garages in the 1950s—a place they go to putter, when they have time.

Though Underhill’s insights are at times reductive (often limiting the design influence of a product or retail space to “female” or “male,” and consistently setting up the “female” as the preferred choice), he assures readers that he brings no “moral or feminist agendas” to the book. The average consumer might appreciate Underhill’s enthusiasm for the subject matter, but marketing execs and retailers will be especially grateful.
- Jen Cutts