Cool Gray City of Love

Cool Gray City of Love is a portrait, in the most classical sense, of San Francisco, and Kamiya is the journeyman traveling the cityscape to capture his subject’s soul. Each chapter centers on a point on San Francisco’s vast landscape, which blossoms into a tiny universe of place and history at Kamiya’s hand. He begins at the Farallon Islands, then jumps to The Tenderloin, then to Alcatraz, followed by Glen Canyon. While the journey can seem as incongruous as Bullitt’s race through San Francisco, it is as equally compelling, entertaining, and stunning. You’ll find yourself pulled along, promising to put… show more.

In this beautifully written book, you find yourself wandering the streets with the author as he comes upon the quirky and eccentric characters and locations that have charmed us all for generations. But you also meet the real people who do the real work that keep this city running, and he doesn’t shy away from visiting the parts of town that are mostly well off the beaten tourist (or local’s) path! There’s probably no other book about San Francisco that made me so glad to live here, but also felt so honest and true to the strange contradictions that define… show more.