Infinite city A San Francisco atlas

SOME years ago, I began spending time in the rural Southern town where my father had been raised, and I often found myself wishing for a decoder ring. Squirrels had longer tails, wisteria bloomed off schedule, and with all the diphthongs and dropped syllables, I had no idea what people were saying. The local language sprouted from the literal and cultural landscape that informed it - its racial history and disappearing farms, the coexistence of deer festivals and meth busts, the households where people wore Carhartts without irony and put "Queer Eye" on TiVo. How to understand all this? An atlas would have helped. Not any atlas, mind you, but one as inventive and affectionate as Rebecca Solnit's INFINITE CITY: A San Francisco Atlas (University of California; cloth, $49.95; paper, $24.95), a collection of 22 maps and accompanying essays paying homage to the city where the author lives. "Infinite City" started as a commissioned project for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which turned to Solnit as it geared up for its 75th anniversary this year. Solnit may be best known for "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West," about the man and milieu that gave birth to motion picture technology. But she has written a dozen other books demonstrating her belief - her obsession, really - that fully exploring any subject demands that one consider its many contexts, ranging from ethnicity, religion, history and immigration, to topography, climate, flora, fauna, gang warfare, foodways and greenways. In the ambitious and mostly delightful "Infinite City," Solnit offers "a small, modest and deeply arbitrary rendering of one citizen's sense of her place in conversation and collaboration with others." To that end, she enlists cartographers, artists, lepidopterists and tribal activists to illuminate San Francisco via multiple angles and contrasting topics. One well-rendered map, "Shipyards and Sounds," juxtaposes World War II shipyards alongside African-American political and musical landmarks and speaks wonderfully to the causes and outcomes of the Great Migration. For another inspired pairing, "Monarchs and Queens," the poet Aaron Shurin writes an exquisite essay on emerging gender identity, coupled with a map of "Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces"; in someone else's hands, the wing-spreading metaphor could have been cloying, but Shurin acknowledges the obvious allusion without belaboring it. In "400 Years and 500 Evictions," the plotted landmarks of four residents, all centenarians or near-centenarians (including the artist Add Bonn, who has been around long enough to note that the Golden Gate Bridge "ruined the view"), are powerful counterpoints to hundreds of dots representing evictions that took place from 2000 to 2005, erasing affordable housing and presumably lowering chances that the city will supply many more of the kind of living histories offered here. Less effectively, the map borrowed from a painting by the artist Alison Pebworth, meant to capture a sense of the lost populations along the city's industrialized east coast, is more mishmash than mashup. And actual maps are occasionally less interesting than what is to be said about them, as with "Who Am I Where?" in which flagged landmarks are enlivened by prose poems from Solnit and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a performance artist. The act of mapping is impossible, Solnit asserts, since "what we call places are stable locations with unstable converging forces." Things are always changing; we all see the world differently. Solnit embraces this cartographic paradox, placing as much value on the act of engagement as on the accuracy of the rendering. Her atlas's title plays off the Halo Calvino novel "Invisible Cities," in which the narrator warns his audience: "The city must never be confused with the words that describe it. And yet between one and the other there is a connection." The specificity of Solnit's choices isn't meant to tamp down imaginations, but to spark them. "While my story is mine," she writes, "my map of San Francisco is also potentially yours." She welcomes all comers to survey her beloved city, even if it's to disagree. - LISE FUNDERBURG