For Cohen (American literary, critical, and cinematic studies; U. of Albany), Alfred Hitchcock's films are "war machines" in the way they undermine Enlightenment-era ways of representation and subvert traditions of home, the family, and the state. Whereas the companion volume that precedes this one, entitled Hitchcock's Cryptonomies, Volume I: Secret Agents , asked how "cryptonomies" operate as "epistemo-political agents mobilized against the home state's ocularcentric and auratic premises," in this work he asks how that "revolutionary uplift" operates after that process, "when this insurrection is, instead, distributed in the totalized horizon of the victor's emergent teletechnic empire, sometimes called 'America' (including Hollywood)." Annotation ©2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)