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 Cityfrom 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 tragedyin 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 futureif 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.

Jon Lee Anderson author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and The Fall of Baghdad

"The city of Mexico, for any outsider, is fascinating, complex, exciting and strange. It is as though a loud and sexy party were going on in the room next door. This book offers an essential key to that room. From now on, anyone who goes to Mexico City without David Lida's book is mad."

Colm Tobn, author of The Master and Mothers and Sons

"Charmingly unaffected, forthright and widely knowledgeable walk through the highs and low of this teeming, complicated, immensely rewarding [hypermetropolis.'

Mexico City operates in a constant state of combustible reinvention, writes longtime resident Lida (Travel Advisory: Stories of Mexico, 2000). Half its population of 20 million lives in poverty. They grapple with severe traffic, as well as service, transportation and crime problems. The government is in "limbo" and resistant to urban planning. But the Distrito Federal has also become the dynamic, spontaneous, cultural capital of Latin America. With the peso stabilized during the last decade, its economy increasingly attracts a global population. As a result, the author argues persuasively, it will be a significant center of 21st-century life. Since transplanting himself from New York in 1990, Lida has gained an excellent sense of how Mexico City functions, or doesn't. He profiles its various neighborhoods, from Santa Fe to Condesa, its street markets and food stalls, festive cantinas and desperate pulqueras. He examines the inhabitants' mania for wrestling matches and saint worship, their distinctive vernacular and the culture's deeply ingrained machismo. Lida observes and listens to the chilangos, an insulting term for city residents proudly appropriated by the younger generation. He captures the voices of the earnest drunks he met in cantinas; the mature fichera who shared stories of her work as a bar companion for men; the 22-year-old accounting student from Ocho Barrios chosen to play Jesus in the Holy Week Passion; a glue-sniffing homeless waif from the army of 3,000 street children; and radio host Anabel Ochoa as she dispensed sex advice to her spectacularly repressed listeners. "Imagine a scene painted by George Grosz, peopled by figures with brown skin," the author writes in an affecting, generous depiction of the wide range of humanity that comprises the city.

Lida depicts his adopted hometown with warmth, humor, wisdom and fortitude."

Kirkus

"David Lida's absorbing book shows us Mexico City in all its many guisesand there are guaranteed to be several dozen more of those than even well-informed readers are likely to know. Lida's eye for detail is impeccable, his writing is crisp and engaging, and he serves as the perfect informant, since he is somehow both an insider and an outsider."

Luc Sante, author of Low Life and Kill All Your Darlings

"I may love Mexico City more than I love David Lida's First Stop in the New World, but it's close. From the wealth of art in Phil Kelly, to the art of wealth in Carlos Slim, from the tianguis to Teotihuacan, Condesa to Tepito, here is the whole storyall kinds of stories big and small, high and low, told with brains and charm, insight and factof la capital as it is lived in today."

Dagoberto Gilb, author of Gritos and Flowers

"You might think that a megalopolis of 20 million people wouldn't lend itself to an intimate portrait. But David Lida has given us one, a weaving of memoir and reportage that is at turns funny and haunting, a personal journey into the crazy geography and tortured psychology of a place called Mexico City. First Stop in the New World captures that most elusive part of Mexico City: its soul."

Hctor Tobar, author of Translation Nation and Mexico City Bureau Chief for the Los Angeles Times

"David Lida has written what will surely stand for years as the definitive Mexico City book. Keen, clear-eyed, street-smart and culture-savvy, filled with eye-popping detail and probing insights, First Stop in the New World manages to do the seemingly impossible: deliver one of the most vexing, stimulating, dynamic and misunderstood capitals on earth into the realm of the comprehensible. It is impossible to imagine a better book about the city, a better writer to deliver it."

Tony Cohan, author of On Mexican Time and Mexican Days

"Nobody knows and understands contemporary Mexico City better than David Lida does. Nobody writes about it with a more passionate devotion and insight, or portrays its myriad inhabitants with such sympathy and humor. One of the world's greatest and most misunderstood cities has found its great translator and chronicler."

Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder