The Lima Reader

"Carlos Aguirre and Charles F. Walker, two leading scholars of Peru, bring their vast expertise to decoding one of this hemisphere’s great cities. Lima is an intriguing, intimidating, pulsing tangle of a metropolis at the desert’s gray ocean edge. The Lima Reader is the single best book for anyone seeking to understand the city in the almost dizzying impossibility of its remarkable history and culture." - Orin Starn, coeditor of The Peru Reader

"The Lima Reader is the most helpful introduction to the Peruvian capital available in any language, and the most compelling since Sebastián Salazar Bondy's Lima the Horrible (1964). With a keen understanding of the city's history, demographic transformations, multiracial complexities, socioeconomic tensions, and insights of creative writers, Carlos Aguirre and Charles F. Walker present a rich gamut of historical, sociological, and literary documents whose satisfying whole is greater than its parts." - Efraín Kristal, University of California, Los Angeles

"A much-needed overview of the creation of this most important coastal city of the Andes. The Lima Reader presents a series of unpublished or not previously translated primary sources and excerpted literature that reveal the multiplicity of forces that converged to shape this contemporary metropolis. . . . An indispensable resource for the classroom and the road. The Lima Reader could greatly benefit the undergraduate survey class, provide critical information for the upper-level seminar, and be of assistance for the seasoned traveler seeking something much deeper than a generic tour guide." - Javier Puente, Journal of Global South Studies

"Brings together an extraordinarily rich array of original sources.  . . . The editors succeed admirably in selecting the best passages (and photographs) that can be found to represent the rich material and cultural tapestry that unfolds in the City of the Kings over the centuries." - Peter Klarén, Latin American Research Review