Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco Author: Gary Kamiya | Language: English | ISBN:
B00D78R550 | Format: PDF
Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco Description
Cool, Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal insight, deeply researched history, in-depth reporting, and lyrical prose to create an unparalleled portrait of San Francisco. Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site or intersection in the city, from the mighty Golden Gate Bridge to the raunchy Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End.
This unique approach captures the exhilarating experience of walking through San Francisco's sublime terrain, while at the same time tying that experience to a history as rollicking and unpredictable as the city herself. From her absurd beginnings as the most distant and moth-eaten outpost of the world's most extensive empire, to her instantaneous fame during the Gold Rush, from her apocalyptic destruction by earthquake and fire to her perennial embrace of rebels, dreamers, hedonists and misfits of all stripes, the City by the Bay has always followed a trajectory as wildly independent as the untrammeled natural forces that created her.
This ambitious, eclectic, and beautifully written book draws on everything from on-the-ground reporting to obscure academic papers to the author's 40-year life in San Francisco to create a rich and insightful portrait of a magical corner of the world. Complete with hand-drawn maps ofthe 49locations, this handsome package will sit comfortably on the short shelf of enduring books about places, alongside E. B. White's
Here is New York, Jose Saramago's
Journey to Portugal, or Alfred Kazin's
A Walker in the City.
- File Size: 1687 KB
- Print Length: 400 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (August 13, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00D78R550
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,056 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > State & Local > West - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > United States > Regions > West > Pacific - #47
in Books > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Travel
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > History > Americas > United States > State & Local > West - #15
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Travel > United States > Regions > West > Pacific - #47
in Books > Education & Reference > Writing, Research & Publishing Guides > Writing > Travel
I've been lucky enough to have traveled to many great cities in the world. But I keep returning here, to what the poet George Sterling called "The Cool Gray City of Love". Despite the notoriously crappy weather, ridiculous cost of living, and misfits living on street corners, San Francisco has a certain sense of place that is unmatched in all the world. Or should I say "sense of places" because San Francisco, perhaps more so than any other city, isn't one place. It's is a ragtag collection of neighborhoods, each with its own unique identity, culture, and history. It's a collection of independent villages, united by the proud belief that "normal" doesn't apply here. As the late great columnist Herb Caen wrote "San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water, and on the fourth by a foreign country."
Gary Kamiya's new book is, without a doubt, the best writing about San Francisco I've read since the passing of Herb Caen. The book is a rambling walking tour, a history lesson, a geological exploration. More than anything else, it's a love letter. Or, more accurately, it's 49 love letters, because Kamiya has structured the book as 49 vignettes, each about a particular spot in the City. He takes us from the place where Europeans first camped in 1776 (Mountain Lake, in today's Richmond District) to a small patch of grass on Telegraph Hill where you can still sit today, watching ships sail through the Gate as one could during the gold rush of 1849. With meticulously-researched history and an easy story-telling style, Kamiya writes of how an Englishman named William Richardson jumped off a ship in 1822, befriended the Spanish comandante at the Presidio and fell in love with his 19-year-old daughter as they danced around the campfire that night.
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