Cool gray city of love 49 views of San Francisco

ABOUT FOUR YEARS AGO, I ran into Gary Kamiya at a San Francisco Public Library sale of volumes deemed too dog-eared, outdated or infrequently checked out to continue occupying shelf space. My family and I walked off with a couple of armfuls of books. Kamiya exited with a wagon-load, a Radio Flyer stacked perilously high with novels, poetry collections, books on art and architecture and regional history and botany and God knows what else. I remember feeling a mix of bemusement and literary inadequacy - and noting his irregular gait. What had happened, I wondered, or had he always limped? But I didn't ask, and we instead exchanged the brief pleasantries of people in the same industry. After we parted, I spotted him going back for (at least) one more load. Now I know: It must have been just before, or soon after, the double knee-replacement surgery that liberated him to take on a herculean task that should inspire envy in any true urbanité: to divide his city into a grid and walk nearly every block. Kamiya - who moonlighted as a San Francisco cabdriver while earning degrees in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley, en route to becoming a founding editor of Salon - calls this "doing the knowledge," the term London cabbies have for the notoriously difficult test they must pass to earn their hack license. But Kamiya wasn't content taking in and transmitting back the lay of the current land. Oh, no. He wanted to tell the tale of San Francisco through time as well as space, to write a kaleidoscopic homage both personal and historical, to "mix the perfect San Francisco cocktail." And you thought walking every block was tough! To tell the geo-politico-psycho history of a city as prismatic as San Francisco, and to do it as skillfully as Kamiya does, is no small undertaking. Yes, at approximately 46 square miles, the city is hardly immense. Its recorded history is pretty spotty before about 1800. (For context, that's around the date at which the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns pronounced New York already too vast and complicated to be apprehended by any one human.) Nevertheless, Kamiya faced a lot of choices when deciding what to stir into his cocktail. He employs a device beloved by writers and artists - and, it should be said, magazine editors - dating at least as far back as Katsushika Hokusai's 1820s series of woodblock prints "36 Views of Mount Fuji." There is an overall chronological progression to "Cool Gray City of Love," but "space trumps time," as Kamiya writes. The lens zooms in and out, flits about town and chooses to rest on, or bypass, parts of the city or junctures in history according to its author's idiosyncratic tastes. This is mostly delightful, though anyone who hasn't lived in San Francisco may feel lost, and I, a local, found myself reaching for a map. Nonresidents may also puzzle over some of Kamiya's leaps. For instance, why, after an initial wistful journey out to the Farallón Islands, the Mesozoic outcrops some 28 miles offshore yet within city limits (where rival bands of nest raiders touched off the "Egg War" of 1863), does he opt to spend the second chapter in the present-day Tenderloin, a zombieland of homelessness and hopelessness that makes the Kansas City of "Looper" look like Pleasantville? Perhaps he felt the urge to announce exactly where on the San Francisco Approval Matrix - in which one axis is gentrify/don't gentrify, and the other is left/ultraleft - he lies. (For the record, he takes on, with bracing specificity, the "progressive forces that have kept out 'progress' and inadvertently created a Museum of Depravity" in the Tenderloin, but "could not imagine San Francisco without it" and calls it "a sadness to keep." That tension is the city in a nutshell.) San Francisco is a metropolis molded, far more than most, by topography and weather, and Kamiya artfully helps us imagine the landscape as it once was: a place of mostly windswept dunes where nomadic bands of American Indians traveled between summer and winter camps, along trails whose contours still exist - as in the route that fixie-riding hipsters today call the Wiggle. Kamiya's march through the city's booms and busts quickens as he approaches the hyperfoodie, I.P.O.-obsessed now. While one could hardly write a history of San Francisco without including the Gold Rush and the 1906 earthquake, Kamiya circumvents well-worn ground for precise evocations: we learn that the Sioux called gold "the yellow metal that drives white men crazy," and that the term "greaser" originally referred to "lower-class Californios" - descendants of the earliest Hispanic settlers - who in the mid-19th century "carried greasy bags of tallow on their backs to... Boston ships." We read the goodbye letter written by the cocky 19-year-old editor of The California Star, who pronounced the tales of gold from the American River to be "a sham," only to be deserted by his staff and readership for the streams near Sacramento: "We have done. Let our word of parting be, Hasta luego." Occasionally, references to Homer and Calvin and Kierkegaard and Kerouac and Nietzsche and Baldwin and Jefferson Airplane and Miles Davis and O zu and Muir pile up a bit too fast and furious. But such displays of "the knowledge" seem genuine, joyful even, and Kamiya mercifully spares us the worst of San Francisco's self-regard. Jerry and Bob and the Diggers are awarded only a passing reference. Twain is served sparingly, perhaps too much so. Emperor Norton and Alma Spreckels appear not at all. Of mixed race himself, Kamiya is particularly insightful about San Francisco's complicated ethnic stew and the waves of tolerance and bigotry that have washed over the city. He does true justice to the horrors the Spanish mission system inflicted on American Indians, and his chapter on the AIDS crisis is a sadness to keep. The largely forgotten role of influential women in the city's early history is well told, though I wish one of the 49 views had been of Gold Rush-era Chinese and Anglo prostitutes made to serve dozens of men a day, or of today's trafficked women, who are too often swept under the rug of the city's sex positiveness. But then, in the best possible way, Kamiya's book left me wanting more, both from him - perhaps a deeper dive into one particular era or neighborhood à la Luc Sante's masterpiece "Low Life" - and from myself. My copy of "Cool Gray City of Love" is full of marginalia like "visit," "!!!!," "must see," "read!" For while Kamiya's symphony of San Francisco is a grand pleasure in its own right, it is also a vital challenge to not rest content with the knowledge anyone else provides of a city you love. Kamiya set himself a daunting task: divide his city into a grid and walk nearly every block, then write a history spanning time and space. CLARA JEFFERY is co-editor of Mother Jones and a 2013 recipient of the PEN /Nora Magid Award for editing.

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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Lifelong Bay Area resident Kamiya (cofounder & columnist, Salon; Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler) describes 49 charmingly different tours of the city he loves. This is not a book about museums, restaurants, or tourist hot spots but instead a portrait of San Francisco from its early days, when the Spanish established a fort at the Presidio, through the boom of the 1849 gold rush and the devastation of the 1906 earthquake, to the colorful, drug-fueled invasion of hippies in the 1960s and the Occupy San Francisco movement of the new millennium. Woven throughout is social and political commentary along with stories from Kamiya's own life. Isolated coves, old factories, and San Francisco's rich ethnic history are as central to the story as Golden Gate Park, Lombard Street, and Coit Tower. Kamiya's excellent powers of description almost (but not quite) obviate the need for maps. VERDICT Humorous, thoughtful, and packed with details, this book is a delight to read. If readers weren't intrigued by San Francisco before reading Kamiya's work, they will be by the end.-Linda M. Kaufmann, Massachusetts Coll. of Liberal Arts Lib., North Adams (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.