Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

Author(s): Gary Kamiya

Travel Writing

A runaway San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, Cool Gray City of Love is a one-of-a-kind book for a one-of-a-kind city. It's a love song in 49 chapters to an extraordinary place, taking 49 different sites around the city as points of entry and inspiration-from a seedy intersection in the Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Lands 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 place more faithfully and fully.


Product Information

"A kaleidoscopic homage both personal and historical ... Kamiya's symphony of San Francisco is a grand pleasure." -New York Times Book Review

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 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 Gary Kamiya does his fellow San Franciscans a favor by charmingly and thoughtfully laying out why this particular swath of 49 square miles inspires such fervor...Cool Gray City of Love wants to capture what it means to be blissed out by San Francisco, and does a solid job of that. But it's really about something bigger. It's about having something in your life - no matter where you live- that makes you glad you're alive. Oscar Villalon on The California Report

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.

General Fields

  • : 9781620401262
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
  • : 4.57
  • : January 2015
  • : 210mm X 140mm X 27mm
  • : United States
  • : January 2015
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Gary Kamiya
  • : Paperback
  • : Jan-15
  • : 979.461
  • : 400
  • : B&W art throughout.