Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco Author: Gary Kamiya | Language: English | ISBN:
1608199606 | Format: PDF
Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco Description
Review
"How do I love thee? In Cool Gray City of Love Gary Kamiya crushes on San Francisco in 49 different ways—from its landscapes and architecture to a fabled past encompassing the Gold Rush, Beats and hippies, the AIDS crisis, and dot.com mania. Now that's love and devotion." —Vanity Fair
"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 . . . 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 . . . Kamiya has written a fitting ode to an exceptional city." —Publishers Weekly
“Kamiya’s relish is contagious . . . [San Francisco] has its defining lyrical panorama for a generation or longer.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Newcomers to San Francisco fall in love with the city every day, but no one can appreciate it quite like a longtime resident. Kamiya proves an ardent, expert guide to his hometown’s history, neighborhoods and landmarks . . . Cool Gray City of Love will open your eyes anew.” —San Jose Mercury News
“I can’t imagine there’s anyone who knows San Francisco better than Gary Kamiya.” —Dave Eggers
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
About the Author
Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland in 1953 and grew up in Berkeley. After dropping out of Yale, he earned his BA and MA in English lit from UC Berkeley, where he won the Mark Schorer Citation. He drove a taxi in San Francisco for 7 years while completing college and working as a freelance writer. After co-founding a short-lived city magazine called
Frisko, he got his first real job at the age of 37 as an editor of the San Francisco
Examiner's Sunday magazine,
Image. After five years at the
Examiner, where he was a culture critic and book editor, he left to co-found the groundbreaking Web site Salon.com, where he was executive editor for 12 years. He is currently a columnist for Salon. His first book,
Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler, was a critically-acclaimed history. He is married to the novelist Kate Moses. They have two children.
- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (August 6, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1608199606
- ISBN-13: 978-1608199600
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
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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