You would expect a book about hippies to be visually exciting, titillating even. After all, hippies were on the experimental edge of a ’60s youth culture that rejected the black-and-white world of the ’50s. Hippies came in colors everywhere. They danced naked in the streets. They took their trips on LSD. They launched a rock ‘n’ roll revolution. And they created vibrant, colorful, sometimes disorienting photographic and graphical styles to represent their experiences.

So it’s no real surprise that Barry Miles’ excellent book Hippie with its wealth of photographs, psychedelic album-cover art and exotic typefaces captures the dynamic visual energy of the youth culture of the ’60s, an energy that continues to influence the way we see things to this day. What is a surprise is that Hippie is so readable, so interesting and, for the most part, so good humored. Miles begins his look at hippie youth culture in 1965, "the first year in which a discernible youth movement began to emerge," and ends in 1971, the year "Jim Morrison joined Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix in the roll call of rock ‘n’ roll superhero deaths." Going year by year, Miles employs brief, sharply drawn vignettes to cover everything from the summer of love (which he wryly notes is now copyrighted by Bill Graham Enterprises) to the Manson family, from Timothy Leary’s LSD trips to George Harrison’s strange walk through Haight Ashbury, from the rise of the Grateful Dead to the end of the Beatles.

Miles dedicates his book "to all the old freaks and hippies everywhere." Yet the book seems remarkably free of nostalgia. Hippie winds up being a refreshing book that is not just for old freaks or young freaks, but rather for any reader with an interest in the look, the feel, the history of a special era.

Who got himself in a bit of a fix recently for describing Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek as a robot ? The answer, in case you’re not up on trivia, is Ken Jennings, who earned a burst of celebrity in 2004 when he won a record 74 straight competitions on television’s longest-running trivia show.

A self-described nerd, Jennings was a software engineer, a devout Mormon and a quiet family man who suddenly found himself talking to David Letterman and Barbara Walters about his game show prowess. A national watercooler phenomenon, he appeared on television so often that his one-year-old son began calling him Ken Jennings! instead of Daddy.

Jennings recounts the whole roller-coaster experience, and more, in Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs. Though he includes snippets of his trivia-crazed youth, his college quiz bowl triumphs and his success on Jeopardy! Brainiac isn’t really a memoir but a broader look at the culture of trivia competitions.

We’ll take software engineers for $200, Alex. Despite the fact that he made a living programming computers, what engineer managed to write a funny and engaging book? The answer, of course, is Jennings himself, who shows a pleasantly nerdy sense of humor throughout (he describes the contestants on the 1960s televised G.E. College Bowl as four heavily Brylcreemed white people with big ears ). Woven into the narrative are 170 trivia questions, with solutions at the end of each chapter. And, just like watching Jeopardy! you don’t have to know all the answers to be entertained.

Now, what’s all this about a feud with Trebek? As it turns out, Jennings saw very little of the host during the show’s tapings, but found him a little chilly, with a tendency toward saltine-dry impartiality. Jennings says a post on his blog implying that Trebek had died and been replaced by a robot was a misunderstood bit of satire. And a good piece of publicity for a smart new author.

If lunch was your favorite subject in school, or if you are a lifelong student of pop culture, don’t miss Lunchbox Inside and Out: From Comic Books to Cult TV and Beyond. Authors Jack Mingo and Erin Barrett start with an appetizer-portion of history, charting the transformation of lunchboxes from the utilitarian accessory of working-class men to the domain of children and marketing tool. “Planned obsolescence,” the concept of “convincing customers to habitually replace perfectly good products for the sake of novelty and style,” played a large role in the development of lunchboxes as we know them today, argue Mingo and Barrett. They say it all started with the introduction of Aladdin’s Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox, closely followed by American Thermos’ Roy Rogers and Dale Evans model. From there, things took off, leading to all sorts of tie-ins to TV shows, toys, movies and sports teams. Lunchbox Inside and Out covers the big players, among them King Seely, Aladdin, American Thermos, ADCO Liberty and Ohio Arts, as well as the evolution from low-resolution decals on metal boxes to elaborate total-box designs on plastic ones. This story of lunchboxes is told in bite-sized morsels, richly illustrated with pieces from the collection of Joe Soucy (examples of which are also crossing the country as part of the Smithsonian’s “Lunch Box Memories” show) and includes handy price codes should you stumble upon a treasure in your attic or at your neighbor’s yard sale. Among the delights found in the book: several Beatles boxes, a 1935 oval-shaped Disney “lunch kit” featuring Mickey and his cohorts and a host of designs that saw their share of PB&andJ over the years.

Psychologist Carol Gilligan is best known for elucidating the ways in which preadolescent girls, acceding to societal expectations, learn to stifle their innate wisdom and exuberance. In her latest work, loosely encapsulating two decades of variegated studies, she broadens her area of inquiry to extend to both sexes (young boys entering grade school, she has observed, begin to curtail their expressiveness in much the same way) and, by extrapolation, to question the diminution of joy that typically accompanies growing up. Ultimately, her aim is to examine, and possibly uproot, Western civilization’s deeply ingrained adherence to a tragic story . . . where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with death. It’s an ambitious undertaking, and Gilligan covers a lot of ground cited sources range from W.E.

B. Du Bois to the Indigo Girls to prove an elusive point. Central to her thesis is an insistent gloss on the ancient story of Psyche and Cupid, whose dramatic, near-tragic courtship ultimately gave birth to a child named Pleasure. Beautiful Psyche, Gilligan holds, was something of a proto-feminist, refusing to accept the image imposed on her by a patriarchal society and deciding instead to seek love on her own terms. This reductionist approach often rankles: after all, the beauty of myths, their enduring value, lies in the fact that their meanings can’t be so neatly confined.

Yet if one is willing to go along with this premise and attendant pronouncements, the journey yields all sorts of eye-opening moments, the most vivid of which involve Gilligan’s recollections of her own mother, whose social and private selves seemed scarcely the same person. Still, memories of pleasure resurface, as well as her encouragement of my pleasure. Love does invariably entail loss, in that those we love die; it’s the human condition. Gilligan is to be commended, though, for advocating in this brave, if sometimes frustrating book that we question our predilection for living on the far side of loss, east of Eden, as a way of protecting ourselves. Men and women alike, she contends, need to summon more courage if we are to transcend an age-old script. After all, as she notes: The birth of pleasure in itself is simple, but staying with pleasure means staying open. Sandy MacDonald is a writer based in Cambridge and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

For that car-enthusiast guy, Dennis Adler’s Porsche: The Road from Zuffenhausen serves as an example of distinguished book-making and automotive history at its detailed finest. Adler is a leading car journalist and photographer. Besides serving as editor-in-chief of Car Collector magazine, he has contributed to high-profile business and auto publications and written numerous books on all manner of car makes and models. Here he turns his attention to the fabulous Porsche and the amazing family that has been producing this classic touring and racing car since the post-World War II era. Adler spares no verbiage in his profiles of people including paterfamilias Ferdinand Porsche, who designed the Volkswagen under the direction of Adolf Hitler prior to launching the Porsche line and in his narrative concerning the manufacturing and marketing of what is possibly the world’s most distinctive sports car. Rare archival photos of the Porsche in development (including technical views of its unique rear-mounted, air-cooled engine), as portrayed in advertising, and in competition on international racetracks help to fully relate this ongoing success story of commitment to automotive innovation and sleek stylishness.