Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

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. (Aug.)