Spirits of San Francisco

August 24, 2020
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Kamiya (Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco) and illustrator Madonna (All Over Coffee) dispatch an eloquent love letter to the fabled city by the bay. “Cities are three-dimensional entities,” writes Kamiya. “But they also exist in a fourth dimension: time.” The chapters are comprised of site-based vignettes, which put exemplars of the city’s natural and man-made beauty in historical context. These include landmarks such as Lombard Street and the Palace of Fine Arts, which Kamiya describes as “a wild architectural acid trip, an ur-Disneyland” and a precursor of sorts to the Burning Man festival. But they also showcase lesser-known locales, such as the Tian Hou Temple (“simultaneously touristy, run-down, and real”) and Ina Coolbrith Park (“An Olympian platform from which Russian Hill denizens could observe the raucous city below”). Despite Kamiya’s pandemic-influenced prologue, the balance of the travelogue is a timeless deep dive into San Francisco’s past. Madonna’s inset pen and ink portraits both bring the reader into the vibe of each site and feel delightfully otherworldly. This artsy tour will appeal to those who may have left their hearts in San Fran, as well as armchair (and aspiring) travelers eager to learn more of its storied past. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.

September 1, 2020
History columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kamiya (Cool Gray City of Love, 2013) delves with affection and an informed eye into the pasts of 16 spots in the city where he has spent a lifetime. Evocative, detailed drawings by Paul Madonna, which are as likely to include a chain link fence and the view of an overpass as more romantic subject matter, set the scene for the places as they exist in the present, while Kamiya's literary excavations reveal how a now-pricey region of the city used to be the location of hobohemia and the Dumpville scavenger colony, while the area now occupied by the Palace of Fine Arts was successively a bucolic island, the city's first bathing resort, an industrial zone, and a refugee camp, each of which the author examines in satisfying detail. Armchair tourists as well as those climbing up and down the city's many hills should relish the book's rich insights into a city almost entirely re-shaped after the destruction of a 1906 earthquake and subsequent fire.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)