Cool Gray City of Love
49 Views of San Francisco
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"A kaleidoscopic homage both personal and historical . . . Kamiya's symphony of San Francisco is a grand pleasure." -New York Times Book Review
The bestselling love letter to one of the world's great cities, San Francisco, by a life-long Bay Area resident and co-founder of Salon.
Cool, Gray City of Love brings together an exuberant combination of personal history, 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. Encompassing the city's Spanish missionary past, a gold rush, a couple of earthquakes, the Beats, the hippies, and the dot-com boom, this book is at once a rambling walking tour, a natural and human history, and a celebration of place itself-a guide to loving any city more faithfully and fully.
For readers of E. B. White's Here is New York, Jose Saramago's Journey to Portugal, or Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City, Cool, Gray City of Love is an ambitious, insightful one-of-a-kind book for a one-of-a-kind city.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the introduction, Kamiya calls this work "a love letter to the place in the world that means the world to me." It's an apt description, because these 49 vignettes are written in a confessional first-person tone that invokes a conversation between two old friends: Kamiya and the city he has called home for over 40 years. It doesn't come as much surprise that Kamiya, a former culture critic and book editor at the San Francisco Examiner and cofounder of Salon.com, writes insightfully about San Francisco's cultural and artistic heritage. He includes chapters about the AIDS crisis, the Beat Generation, dive bars, and theaters, sprinkling in references to the city's counter-culture revolution, literary legacy, and dot-com booms and busts. Though Kamiya puts his own spin on these tales, they seem all too familiar. It is the other stories that truly impress including the historical ones about the city's founding and its original Native American inhabitants. Also impressive is the author's uncanny grasp of the bay's natural history and the way that the landscape continues to shape the lives of current San Franciscans. In the end, Kamiya has written a fitting ode to an exceptional city.
