Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco - Paperback

by Gary Kamiya (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland in 1953, grew up in Berkeley, and has lived in San Francisco since 1971. He cofounded Salon.com, where he was executive editor for twelve years and then a columnist. His first book, Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler, was a critically-acclaimed history of Britain's top secret Special Operations Executive. Kamiya is currently executive editor of San Francisco Magazine.