Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya

Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya

"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.

Gary Kamiya is a San Francisco native who was born in Oakland in 1953, grew up in Berkeley, and has lived in the city since 1971. He cofounded Salon.com, where he worked for twelve years as executive editor and then as a writer. Shadow Knights: The Secret Battle Against Hitler, his first book, received great acclaim as a history of Britain's top-secret Special Operations Executive. Kamiya is the executive editor of San Francisco Magazine at the moment.