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Gary Kamiya
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Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco Kindle Edition

by Gary Kamiya (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 620 ratings
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"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.
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  1. Print length
    401 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Bloomsbury USA
  5. Publication date
    August 6, 2013
  6. File size
    8217 KB
  7. Page Flip
    Enabled
  8. Word Wise
    Enabled
  9. Enhanced typesetting
    Enabled
  10. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“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

“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

“I can't imagine there's anyone who knows San Francisco better than Gary Kamiya.” ―Dave Eggers

About the Author

Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland in 1953 and grew up in Berkeley. After dropping out of Yale, he earned his BA and MA in English lit from UC Berkeley, where he won the Mark Schorer Citation. He drove a taxi in San Francisco for 7 years while completing college and working as a freelance writer. After co-founding a short-lived city magazine called Frisko, he got his first real job at the age of 37 as an editor of the San Francisco Examiner's Sunday magazine, Image. After five years at the Examiner, where he was a culture critic and book editor, he left to co-found the groundbreaking Web site Salon.com, where he was executive editor for 12 years. He is currently a columnist for Salon. His first book, Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler, was a critically-acclaimed history. He is married to the novelist Kate Moses. They have two children.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00D78R550
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury USA; 1st edition (August 6, 2013)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 6, 2013
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 8217 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 401 pages
  • Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1620401266
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 620 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
620 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Elisabeth Clobucker
5.0 out of 5 stars I ❤️ love this book!
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2023
Verified Purchase
It has given me a new love of San Francisco in times when I was unsure of that love. Gary Kamiya writes so well about the stories and is so descriptive that one feels like they are there.
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citykittysf
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful SF History
Reviewed in the United States on April 25, 2024
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Fascinating recounting of disparate facts of SF history. Loved it enough to buy it as a birthday gift.
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Heather E. Hagerman
4.0 out of 5 stars History in succulent bites...
Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2014
Verified Purchase
This is a pastiche of people and places, a primer on many aspects of San Francisco. Having grown up nearby I can say that about half of this book is simply common knowledge to literate locals. We have been to the places, seen the view, and know the story. The other half of the material is a revelation, like finding an Indian burial mound in grandma's basement, and suddenly understanding why there is a peculiar slope to her back yard. I found myself on many familiar paths but when the twists came they were illuminating. The other thing that kept me reading was Kamiya's language. He writes with a direct, insightful, and witty style that befits a San Francisco newsman. His sentences are a pleasure to read.

One other important thing, I can honestly say this book was the first I have read on a tablet where the experience was better than on paper. I found myself constantly toggling between my reader app and google maps. With google maps I could actually teleport myself to the very spot where each of the 49 essays is embarked. Wow! How technology dazzles.
24 people found this helpful
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Bret Waters
5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Love Letter to San Francisco
Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2013
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I've been lucky enough to have traveled to many great cities in the world. But I keep returning here, to what the poet George Sterling called "The Cool Gray City of Love". Despite the notoriously crappy weather, ridiculous cost of living, and misfits living on street corners, San Francisco has a certain sense of place that is unmatched in all the world. Or should I say "sense of places" because San Francisco, perhaps more so than any other city, isn't one place. It's is a ragtag collection of neighborhoods, each with its own unique identity, culture, and history. It's a collection of independent villages, united by the proud belief that "normal" doesn't apply here. As the late great columnist Herb Caen wrote "San Francisco is surrounded on three sides by water, and on the fourth by a foreign country."

Gary Kamiya's new book is, without a doubt, the best writing about San Francisco I've read since the passing of Herb Caen. The book is a rambling walking tour, a history lesson, a geological exploration. More than anything else, it's a love letter. Or, more accurately, it's 49 love letters, because Kamiya has structured the book as 49 vignettes, each about a particular spot in the City. He takes us from the place where Europeans first camped in 1776 (Mountain Lake, in today's Richmond District) to a small patch of grass on Telegraph Hill where you can still sit today, watching ships sail through the Gate as one could during the gold rush of 1849. With meticulously-researched history and an easy story-telling style, Kamiya writes of how an Englishman named William Richardson jumped off a ship in 1822, befriended the Spanish comandante at the Presidio and fell in love with his 19-year-old daughter as they danced around the campfire that night. Richardson and Maria Antonia Martinez got married, built the first home in Yerba Buena Cove, and raised three kids as a town grew around them. Kamiya writes "It cannot be a coincidence that one of the world's great cosmopolitan party towns was founded by a runaway who had just met a mixed-race hottie at an all-nighter".

If you love San Francisco as much as I do, with its twisted history and crooked streets, you will love this beautifully-written book. Highly recommended.
69 people found this helpful
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Myrna Jacobs
5.0 out of 5 stars I love this book.
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2023
Verified Purchase
I ordered this thinking I had lost the one my Son gave me. I found the original he gave me later. The author is a delight with hard data and fun facts and interesting ways of telling his story of San Francisco. I love the city and cry when I have to leave. I grew up with Herb Cain ..... (spell?) and that man would be proud of this book. Clever, heart felt love for a city.
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Bikerguy
5.0 out of 5 stars I am keeping this book handy in my day pack, as I walk around San Francisco on my upcoming visit to the city
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2016
Verified Purchase
Whether you live in the San Francisco Bay area or you are visiting, you will learn the neighborhoods, history and geology of San Francisco when you buy and read this book. I am planning a visit with friends who live in the city. My desire, like all travellers is to experience my destination like people who actually live there. Gary Kamiya's "Cool Gray City of Love" has met all my expectations. It is a book that exemplifies the best of books in the travel genre.

Early in "Cool Gray City of Love", Kamiya describes his plan to walk the neighborhood's of San Francisco to learn the character and history of the very city he has lived in most of his life. It is clear he has not lived at the economic "top" of San Francisco's population so he has a strong empathy for those in the middle and bottom. Both of his knees have been replaced. He describes surviving a grim colon cancer diagnosis briefly. He has rented, more than owned homes. In a turnabout, after renting from a Chinese woman landlord, he in turn buys a subdivided home where he rents affordable rooms to Chinese renters.

The book is organized in 49 small chapters that roughly correspond to a neighborhood or part of neighborhood, many neighborhood's are covered in more than one "view" or chapter. As exceptions, he does concentrate on features in the city such as staircases, dirt paths and geology. Uniquely, in books on San Francisco his first two chapters are about the Farallon Islands and the Tenderloin District. I particularly enjoyed two views. The first about Billy Goat Hill led me to learn much about the geology of the San Francisco Bay region. Indeed, as a result of that chapter I purchased an book on Amazon by geologist Clyde Wahrhaftig entitled "A Streetcar to Subduction" and a book by Doris Sloan, one of his students. Another view at the southernmost city line with Daly City, I learned about an obscure National Historical site that memorialized - with two stone obelisks- a famous duel.

Here is a Permalink to my review of Wahrhaftig's Book: https://www.amazon.com/review/REOVT9XPJM2M1/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

In summary, this book has be one very useful for planning my upcoming trip. I have created many stars, indicating favourite places, in Google Maps so I can easily find my way around the city to these locations. And as I walk around the city, this book will be in my day pack.
4 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

William
4.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written in a clear journalistic style
Reviewed in Australia on August 16, 2017
Verified Purchase
History, sociology,politics and memoir all mixed together. Beautifully written in a clear journalistic style. A love letter to one of the world's great cities!
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