Illusion and Disillusionment: Travel Writing in the Modern Age seeks to understand, expand, and challenge the boundaries of the modern travelogue across several literary traditions. Through an engaging cast of characters—China-bound missionaries, an Indo-Persian diplomat, a Turkish exile in India, a French schoolteacher touring America, Arab students in Moscow, a Japanese woman writer in Europe—this volume extends the study of travel writing beyond the frameworks of colonialism, imperialism, and Orientalism, focusing on the experience of travel itself.

Ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, its eight essays analyze travelers from varied nationalities and social backgrounds, who followed different itineraries, used different means of transportation, and wrote for different audiences. The authors place the East and South Asian, Middle Eastern, and European texts and travelers in their socio-historical contexts. Exploring recurrent themes and structures in a set of travel narratives, these essays contribute to broader comparative and cross-cultural studies of travel, self-writing, and transnational lives.

It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices.

Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere.

This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

To many observers, the 1981 election of Henry Cisneros as mayor of San Antonio, Texas, represented the culminating victory in the Chicano community's decades-long struggle for inclusion in the city's political life. Yet, nearly twenty years later, inclusion is still largely an illusion for many working-class and poor Chicanas and Chicanos, since business interests continue to set the city's political and economic priorities.

In this book, Rodolfo Rosales offers the first in-depth history of the Chicano community's struggle for inclusion in the political life of San Antonio during the years 1951 to 1991, drawn from interviews with key participants as well as archival research. He focuses on the political and organizational activities of the Chicano middle class in the context of post-World War II municipal reform and how it led ultimately to independent political representation for the Chicano community. Of special interest is his extended discussion of the role of Chicana middle-class women as they gained greater political visibility in the 1980s.

This is the first book to challenge the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws.

The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of "law abiders" and "disorderly people" and of "order" and "disorder," which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society.

How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.

Will Saudi Arabia join the democratic wave in the Middle East? The uprisings and revolutions of 2011 do not, yet, seem to have affected the stability of the House of Saud, which remains secretive, highly repressive and propped up by the West.

The Islamic Utopia uses a range of sources including first-hand reporting and recently released WikiLeaks documents to examine Saudi Arabia in the decade after the 9/11 attacks, when King Abdullah’s 'reform' agenda took centre stage in public debate. It considers Saudi claims of 'exemption' from the democratic demands of the Arab Spring.

Andrew Hammond argues that for too long Western media and governments have accepted Saudi leaders' claims to be a buttress against jihadist Islam and that a new policy is needed towards the House of Saud.

As much a portrait of his time as a biography of the man, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion returns the author of Das Kapital to his nineteenth-century world, before twentieth-century inventions transformed him into Communism’s patriarch and fierce lawgiver. Gareth Stedman Jones depicts an era dominated by extraordinary challenges and new notions about God, human capacities, empires, and political systems—and, above all, the shape of the future.

In the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, a Europe-wide argument began about the industrial transformation of England, the Revolution in France, and the hopes and fears generated by these occurrences. Would the coming age belong to those enthralled by the revolutionary events and ideas that had brought this world into being, or would its inheritors be those who feared and loathed it? Stedman Jones gives weight not only to Marx’s views but to the views of those with whom he contended. He shows that Marx was as buffeted as anyone else living through a period that both confirmed and confounded his interpretations—and that ultimately left him with terrible intimations of failure.

Karl Marx allows the reader to understand Marx’s milieu and development, and makes sense of the devastating impact of new ways of seeing the world conjured up by Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Ricardo, Saint-Simon, and others. We come to understand how Marx transformed and adapted their philosophies into ideas that would have—through twists and turns inconceivable to him—an overwhelming impact across the globe in the twentieth century.

In 1920, an unknown journalist named Katherine Anne Porter first sojourned in Mexico. When she left her "familiar country" for the last time in 1931, she was the celebrated author of Flowering Judas and Other Stories and had accumulated a wealth of experiences and impressions that would inspire numerous short stories, essays, and reviews, as well as the opening section of her only novel, Ship of Fools.

In this perceptive study of Porter's Mexican experiences, Thomas Walsh traces the important connections between those events and her literary works. Separating fact from the fictions that Porter constantly created about her life, he follows the active role that she played in Mexican political and intellectual life—even to the discovery of a plot to overthrow the Mexican government, which eventually figured in Flowering Judas.

Most important, Walsh discerns how the great swings between depression and elation that characterized Porter's emotional life influenced her alternating visions of Mexico. In such works as "Xochimilco," Porter saw Mexico as an earthly Eden where hopes for a better society could be realized, but in other stories, including "The Fiesta of Guadalupe," she depicts Mexico as a place of hopeless oppression for the native peoples.

Mexico, Porter once said, gave her back her Texas past. Given the unhappiness of that past, her feelings toward Mexico would always be ambivalent, but her Mexican experiences influenced all her subsequent works to some degree, even those pieces not specifically Mexican in setting. Walsh's study, then, is an essential key for anyone seeking greater understanding of the life or works of Katherine Anne Porter.

German cinema of the Third Reich, even a half-century after Hitler's demise, still provokes extreme reactions. "Never before and in no other country," observes director Wim Wenders, "have images and language been abused so unscrupulously as here, never before and nowhere else have they been debased so deeply as vehicles to transmit lies." More than a thousand German feature films that premiered during the reign of National Socialism survive as mementoes of what many regard as film history's darkest hour.

As Eric Rentschler argues, however, cinema in the Third Reich emanated from a Ministry of Illusion and not from a Ministry of Fear. Party vehicles such as Hitler Youth Quex and anti-Semitic hate films such as Jew Süss may warrant the epithet "Nazi propaganda," but they amount to a mere fraction of the productions from this era. The vast majority of the epoch's films seemed to be "unpolitical"--melodramas, biopix, and frothy entertainments set in cozy urbane surroundings, places where one rarely sees a swastika or hears a "Sieg Heil."

Minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Rentschler shows, endeavored to maximize film's seductive potential, to cloak party priorities in alluring cinematic shapes. Hitler and Goebbels were master showmen enamored of their media images, the Third Reich was a grand production, the Second World War a continuing movie of the week. The Nazis were movie mad, and the Third Reich was movie made. Rentschler's analysis of the sophisticated media culture of this period demonstrates in an unprecedented way the potent and destructive powers of fascination and fantasy. Nazi feature films--both as entities that unreeled in moviehouses during the regime and as productions that continue to enjoy wide attention today--show that entertainment is often much more than innocent pleasure.

Examines the role of architecture in the history of global development and decolonization.

In Modernism’s Magic Hat, Ijlal Muzaffar examines how modern architects and planners help resolve one of the central dilemmas of the mid-twentieth-century world order: how to make decolonization plausible without accounting for centuries of capital drain under colonial rule. In the years after World War II, architects and planners found extensive opportunities in new international institutions—such as the World Bank, the UN, and the Ford Foundation—and helped shape new models of global intervention that displaced the burden of change onto the inhabitants. Muzaffar argues that architecture in this domain didn’t just symbolically represent power, but formed the material domain through which new modes of power acquired sense. Looking at a series of architectural projects across the world, from housing in Ghana to village planning in Nigeria and urban planning in Venezuela and Pakistan, Muzaffar explores how architects and planners shaped new ideas of time, land, climate, and the decolonizing body, making them appear as sources of untapped value. What resulted, Muzaffar argues, is a widespread belief in spontaneous Third World “development” without capital, which continues to foreclose any global discussion of colonial theft.