This edited collection focusing on Guatemala comprises a series of essays that address the manifestations of neoliberalism in practice. Not surprisingly given Guatemala's troubled history, the chapters foreground issues of security and danger in terms of how people respond to such forces in a neoliberal setting that has seen the withdrawal of the state from the everyday lives of its citizens. The book entails a series of ethnographic accounts centred on Guatemala City and is correctly identified as one of the first comparative attempts to counter the predominantly rural and Mayan anthropological studies of life in Guatemala. For this alone, the book is worth reading. Indeed, although the editors are careful to acknowledge the fledgling and pioneering studies of Guatemala City since the late 1960s, not least by Bryan Roberts, this book is certainly the first of its kind to situate them within contemporary debates of neoliberalism, security and violence, all of which fundamentally shape the functioning of the city.

Yet the book will appeal to those beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology or scholars of Guatemala. Thomas, O'Neill and Offit's excellent introduction outlines three key themes that provide the book with sound intellectual coherence. Reflecting the wider neoliberal agenda in the country at large, the first theme focuses on how responsibility for law enforcement has been abrogated by the state and shifted to the private sector and communities. In turn, the structural underpinnings of new forms of violence are blamed on individuals, collective violent actors such as gangs, or the phenomenon of delinquency. The second theme highlights how Guatemalans experience the new violence, security and fear in both negative and positive ways. Finally, the collection explores how such experiences of neoliberal security affect how cities function. In particular, it examines how urban spaces are constructed and how the wider spatial organisation of a mid-sized city, where the rich and poor are less likely to be segregated than in the large mega-cities of the world, is influenced by security concerns. Indeed, another interesting dimension of the book is its concentration on the working and middle classes as well as the exploration of the interlocking relationships between urban and rural spaces in the country as a whole.

Securing the City is very thoughtfully structured into two main sections. The first, on ‘Urban History and Social Experience’, is, as the title suggests, effectively foundational in terms of considering how the spaces and people of Guatemala City have emerged and developed before and through the neoliberal period. All the chapters focus either on an individual, a family or a specific place to show how the city has grown in complex ways that reflect gender, race and class oppressions and opportunities in different forms. Levenson's chapter, for instance, provides a fascinating account of the changes in Guatemala City since the 1930s through the lens of one family. In a deliberate challenge to representations of the city as a decaying site of despair, she notes poignantly that ‘their urban desde abajo (from below) modernity has taken shape as a renovating spirit and creative drive, as each has tried to avoid the terrible stagnant predicaments of the city’ (p. 45), although she is careful to highlight the challenges they faced as well. The latter theme is continued by Manuela Camus, who analyses the desclasamiento (loss of class distinction) in a particular neighbourhood of public sector housing where neoliberal policies and their concomitant violence and insecurities are put under the microscope to show how divisive both forces can be. Overturning established assumptions about ethnicity, culture and class again emerge as central to the ways in which Don Napo, the Mayan ‘cacique’ described in Thomas Offit's engaging chapter, runs his successful shoe retailing empire. This section finishes with an account of the paradoxes of urban renewal in the city by Véliz and O'Neill, who analyse the street vendors of the Centro Histórico in their struggles against the neoliberalisation of public space and especially ‘urban renewal's ability to divide’ (p. 99).

The second section on ‘Guatemala City and Country’ extends the geographical scope beyond the capital to encompass the multifarious linkages between urban and rural, and especially the ways in which contemporary neoliberal orderings influence expressions of violence and security through these connections. In one of the more explicit manifestations of the neoliberalisation of the Guatemalan state, the chapter by Dickins de Girón explores the contours of the private security sector. She provides some interesting insights into how this industry has emerged to deal with the rising tide of violence arguably created by a dominant economic model that favours the rich, who paradoxically require protection in light of the failure of the state to provide security. The intersections between rural and urban are continued in Benson, Thomas and Fischer's chapter, which focuses on the emergence of structural violence and how this links with the predominance of market forces from the perspective of the small town of Tecpán. In another explicit outcome of neoliberal processes, Kedron Thomas’ chapter examines the nature of the apparel industry also in Tecpán, but in subverted form through the pirate production of brand clothing. The complex circuits created between the capital and countryside, which are interpolated by actual or perceived violence and insecurities, are further explored by Kevin Lewis O'Neill in his riveting chapter on neo-Pentecostal churches, which focuses on the El Shaddai megachurch. He outlines how the charity disbursed from these churches is delivered to the indigenous in rural areas rather the ‘delinquents’ of Guatemala City in ways that both divide and unite the city and the countryside.

As a whole and as individual chapters, this book delivers what many others promise but never do; that is, to describe, analyse and explain the grassroots and everyday experiences and practices of neoliberalism, violence and security. In some ways, the Guatemalan context is irrelevant as the wider processes that affect many countries of the world today come to the fore. Yet in other ways, this is one of the most interesting books about Guatemala available today; it challenges many preconceived ideas about the country, about its indigenous population, about the nature and causes of violence and insecurity, and about the formation of porous and contested urban space. As a result, the book is a pleasure to read on many levels, as ethnography, as contemporary discourse, and as an insight into complex racial, class and gender divisions and solidarities within a country.