| First Stop in the New World: Mexico City, the Capital of the 21st Century | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 17 reviews)
Sales Rank: 34285
Category: Book
Author: David Lida
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Studio: Riverhead Hardcover
Manufacturer: Riverhead Hardcover
Label: Riverhead Hardcover
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 1594489890
Dewey Decimal Number: 972.53084
EAN: 9781594489891
ASIN: 1594489890
Publication Date: June 12, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A panoramic literary portrait of Mexico City? a vibrant, seductive, paradoxical city now commanding the world?s attention and showing us the way to the future of urban life.
David Lida moved to Mexico City fifteen years ago in search of a kind of culture, energy, and spontaneity that he thought had been lost in his native New York City. What he found was a thriving, miraculous urban center comprising centuries of living history, even as its rapid development was making it a prominent force on the world stage. Through the eyes of an American who has become an insider, First Stop in the New World is a street-level panorama of contemporary Mexico City?from the high arts to the sex industry; from the dense jungle of urban politics to the interactions of everyday commerce; from one end of this five-hundred-square-mile city to the other. Lida expertly captures the kaleidoscopic nature of life in a city defined by pleasure and danger, justice and lawlessness, ecstatic joy and appalling tragedy?in limbo between the developed and developing worlds.
While London and Paris have become more homogenous, less captivating, and less surprising since the days when Dickens and Balzac wrote about them, Mexico City points to our urban future?if Manhattan was, as posited by Rem Koolhaas, the urban ?Rosetta Stone of the twentieth century,? Mexico City will play that same role in the twenty-first. And with his personal, literary-journalistic account, David Lida will serve as the ultimate chronicler of this exciting city at a vital moment in its history.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 A mix of great articles and tedious fluff September 5, 2008
The book is a must read for anyone interested in Mexico City. There are indeed a number of great articles which not only present colorful vignettes of Mexico City but also provide a context that presents them in their historical and cultural place. (e.g. the Moneda street markets in the context of the tianguis tradition and how it's succumb to he mega stores). But there are also quite a few chapters that seem half-written and aimless. The book is good but it could have used an editor, a few more good articles, or both.
 Read this book, join the 16th to the 21st centuries September 2, 2008
Like other reviewers I love Mexico City and I am constantly asked, by friends trembling in fear, why I am going to the DF "again" and why I'm not terrified to go there.
From now on, I'm going to make them buy Lida's book and read it. He can say it better than I ever will. Then if they want to talk to me about Mexico City, we'll have some reality to talk about. Reading this book, I was deliriously happy. Lida gets it about Mexico City. His writing is clear, straight-ahead, and evocative. He offers a sense that rings true of life in the great, enlivening and fabulously weird and wonderful metropolis and especially the citizens of a city where you can find pyramids in someone's yard, and where my neighbors greet my xoloitzcuintli dog and then whisper to me (so the dog can't hear) "We used to eat them."
There is so much bad writing about Mexico, way too many misconceptions, and far too much narrow reporting of events and people who are at the extremes - movie stars, assassins, cartels, and Mexicans crossing the line into the lost (stolen?) provinces of California and Arizona. Lida tells us what the vast majority of defenos do and think and say. And eat.
Get this book, read it and join Lida in the 21st century.
Like being there August 31, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As a person who spent some teenage years living there. The sights and smells of a much smaller Mexico city of the 1950's returned to me.
Any one who gives this book a one star rating is totally out of touch
with reality. Mexico city has remained the same in just about all
aspects except that it is chaos on a greatly magnified scale.
This book goes where no run of the mill travel book will take you.
It will rub your nose into the filth as well as the lives of middle and upper class of the humans that reside there. A no holds barred adventure
I highly recomend it as a true taste of the Mexico city experience.
Lida takes the scariness out of Mexico City August 20, 2008
David Lida observes, in his book "First Stop in the New World", that "what differentiates Mexico City from many other places in the relative ease with which a foreigner finds his place". That will come as a surprise to many who think of a scary, polluted sprawl teetering on the cusp of chaos and corruption. Lida, a resident journalist for nearly two decades, found his place by rambling through its countless neighborhoods, hanging out in cantinas, and talking to people about what it is like to live in a city where everyday survival can be a chancy matter of whatever, whenever, however. The book brims with personal experiences and each is put in a knowledgeable context of Mexico's unique history, culture, politics and economics. Lida succeeds is making this "emphatically Mexican city" seem less daunting by making it more comprehensible as a template for 21st century urban civilization.
Informative and much more... August 18, 2008
Not a bad read, especially for those interested in physical, political, economic details surrounding this great metropolis that is Mexico City. Great insight on the Mexican character although nothing new. Still, I recommend it to those in search of more than the usual tourist trap descriptions.
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