A guided tour through the nuanced politics of architectural illusion, "The Vatican to Vegas" takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the seventeenth century to the Electronic Baroque of today. The "scripted spaces" described by Norman Klein are punctuated with devices widely used in special effects since 1500: shocks, surprise twists, grand fakes and copies. Since its publication 2004, THE VATICAN TO VEGAS has emerged as a classic across many fields, from media, architecture, to the fine arts and urban planning. Its timing was ironic: Klein assumed in 2004 that the future of scripted illusion was about to radically shift. This new edition brings the ironic story up to the present, and into the digitally overwhelmed "scripted spaces" of the future.

Seven Minutes is a social and aesthetic history of the "controlled anarchy" of the cartoon, from the first talking Mickeys to the demise of Warners and MGM theatrical productions in 1960. Norman M. Klein follows the scrambling graphics and upside-down ballet of Fleischer's Betty Boop, Popeye, Superman of the Wolfie cartoons by Tex Avery, of the Bugs and Daffy, Tweetie and Roadrunner cartoons from Warners, of full animation at Disney, of the "whiteness of Snow White", and of how Mickey Mouse became a logo. Reviewing the graphics, scripts and marketing of each era, he discovers the links between cartoons and live action movies, newspapers, popular illustration, and the entertainment architecture coming out of Disneyland. Klein shows that the cartoon was a perverse juggling act, invaded constantly by economic and political pressures, by marketing for sound, by licensing characters to stave off bankruptcies, by Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II and the first wave of television.

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an 'anti-tour' of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been 'forgotten'.