Cool Gray City of Love

June 3, 2013
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.

August 1, 2013

Lifelong Bay Area resident Kamiya (cofounder & columnist, Salon; Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler) describes 49 charmingly different tours of the city he loves. This is not a book about museums, restaurants, or tourist hot spots but instead a portrait of San Francisco from its early days, when the Spanish established a fort at the Presidio, through the boom of the 1849 gold rush and the devastation of the 1906 earthquake, to the colorful, drug-fueled invasion of hippies in the 1960s and the Occupy San Francisco movement of the new millennium. Woven throughout is social and political commentary along with stories from Kamiya's own life. Isolated coves, old factories, and San Francisco's rich ethnic history are as central to the story as Golden Gate Park, Lombard Street, and Coit Tower. Kamiya's excellent powers of description almost (but not quite) obviate the need for maps. VERDICT Humorous, thoughtful, and packed with details, this book is a delight to read. If readers weren't intrigued by San Francisco before reading Kamiya's work, they will be by the end.--Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll. of Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams

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