Here are 100 books that Infinite City fans have personally recommended if you like
Infinite City.
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As someone who lived through the very interesting and tumultuous 1960s and 70s, I am fascinated by details of other’s experiences of the same time frame. I inhabited the early 70s fully, going to so many once-in-a-lifetime cultural events: poetry readings, music performances, avant-garde theater, and ‘be-ins’ or ‘happenings.’ With a Masters degree in Creative Writing, I have been an observer of culture and art for several decades. I am the author of three collections of poetry, a book of short fiction, a novel, and a book for writers.
A nonfiction book that reads like a novel; I loved this book because it gave context to one of San Francisco’s darkest days. On November 27, 1978, California suffered a terrible blow as its beloved mayor, George Moscone, and its first openly gay Supervisor, Harvey Milk, were assassinated.
With its infamous ‘Twinkie defense,” the assailant, Dan White, attempted to convince the city that he was temporarily insane. I loved learning about the behind-the-scenes politics.
The critically acclaimed, San Francisco Chronicle bestseller—a gripping story of the strife and tragedy that led to San Francisco’s ultimate rebirth and triumph.
Salon founder David Talbot chronicles the cultural history of San Francisco and from the late 1960s to the early 1980s when figures such as Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Jim Jones, and Bill Walsh helped usher from backwater city to thriving metropolis.
Injustice has always motivated my research and activism. I have always been fascinated by nature and by the complexity of cities. For 25 years I have pursued these passions through the lens of sustainability. In 1996, I co-founded the not-for-profit Sustainable Calgary Society. My extensive work and travel in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, have given me a healthy skepticism of the West’s dominant cultural myths of superiority and benevolence and a keen awareness of the injustice of the global economic order. My book selections shed light on these myths and suggest alternative stories of where we come from, who we are, and who we might become.
San Francisco the good, an icon of diversity, creativity, and prosperity, is how I imagined the city. This book weaves a compelling, alternative narrative. Brechin tells his story through the rising fortunes of founding fathers–politicians, engineers, and entrepreneurs–many today memorialized in San Francisco’s public spaces and places. People like media tycoon William Randolph Hearst Jr. with all his narcissism, wealth, and political ambition (remind you of anyone?). The book unearths the city’s beginnings in the rapacious extraction of resources in frontier California. It illustrates (through art, newspaper cartoons, and headlines) the city as the spearhead of an emerging empire with all of its racist and white supremacist roots. The book chronicles the trauma inflicted on nature and nations that stood in the way of San Francisco’s ambition. It demands that we reflect on ‘the stuff’ our great cities are made of.
First published in 1999, this celebrated history of San Francisco traces the exploitation of both local and distant regions by prominent families - the Hearsts, de Youngs, Spreckelses, and others - who gained power through mining, ranching, water and energy, transportation, real estate, weapons, and the mass media. The story uncovered by Gray Brechin is one of greed and ambition on an epic scale. Brechin arrives at a new way of understanding urban history as he traces the connections between environment, economy, and technology and discovers links that led, ultimately, to the creation of the atomic bomb and the nuclear…
My early memories of San Francisco in the late 1970s are anything but glamorous. We lived in a crummy apartment down the street from the People’s Temple, and my preschool, in the always gray Sunset, served carob, not chocolate. Despite decamping for the greener pastures and white sands of Carmel-By-The-Sea, I was forever hooked by the gritty magic of San Francisco. I eventually returned to the city’s foggy Richmond District, where now I ruminate on past adventures, plot new ones, and write about the place I love. I'm the author of Moon Napa Sonoma, Moon California, and Moon Northern California, and my work has appeared in 7x7, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Alaska Magazine.
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 the book down at the end of each chapter but unable to, falling in love with the city as you go.
"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…
My early memories of San Francisco in the late 1970s are anything but glamorous. We lived in a crummy apartment down the street from the People’s Temple, and my preschool, in the always gray Sunset, served carob, not chocolate. Despite decamping for the greener pastures and white sands of Carmel-By-The-Sea, I was forever hooked by the gritty magic of San Francisco. I eventually returned to the city’s foggy Richmond District, where now I ruminate on past adventures, plot new ones, and write about the place I love. I'm the author of Moon Napa Sonoma, Moon California, and Moon Northern California, and my work has appeared in 7x7, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Alaska Magazine.
Dive down San Francisco’s counterculture rabbit hole with Joel Selvin, the Bay Area’s best rock journalist. Altamont chronicles the rise and fall of the infamous Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont raceway in the Bay Area’s eastern hills, which notoriously end with the murder of concertgoer Meredith Hunter by the Hells Angels. Selvin’s unvarnished coverage goes deep into the world of the 1960s rock scene where innocence and ugliness, odd allegiances, and creative force make a unique cultural moment in the Bay Area. You’ll also get to know some big names in rock, and witness the counterculture as it gets distorted and its innocence lost, as the money gets better and the drugs stronger. You’ll never listen to the Stones or the Dead the same way again.
In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont concert, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s. In the annals of rock history, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December 6, 1969, has long been seen as the distorted twin of Woodstock-the day that shattered the Sixties' promise of peace and love when a concertgoer was killed by a member of the Hells Angels, the notorious biker club acting as security. While most people know of the events from…
I study culture. Ever since I was little, I’ve been fascinated by what people think, feel, believe, have, and do. I’ve always wondered why people need things to be meaningful. Why do people need an explanation for why things happen that puts the meaning outside their own minds? I wanted to get beyond the need for things to be meaningful by themselves, so I began looking into meaning-making as a thing we do. Once I realized the process was infinitely more interesting and valuable, I read books like those on my list. I hope they spark you as much as they have me.
I love that Basso can take me so far inside someone's mind that I can begin to understand not just what they think and feel but how and why they think and feel it.
This book contains the very systems and processes that we use to make knowledge and meaning, and I love learning about a way of knowing and making meaning that is very different from mine—entirely logical, purposeful, valid, and different from mine.
This remarkable book introduces us to four unforgettable Apache people, each of whom offers a different take on the significance of places in their culture. Apache conceptions of wisdom, manners and morals, and of their own history are inextricably intertwined with place, and by allowing us to overhear his conversations with Apaches on these subjects Basso expands our awareness of what place can mean to people.
Most of us use the term sense of place often and rather carelessly when we think of nature or home or literature. Our senses of place, however, come not only from our individual experiences…
I’m a historian of early modern Europe. I have a particular interest in the history of violence and social relations and how and why ordinary people came into conflict with each other and how they made peace, that’s the subject of my most recent book Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe, which compares the entanglement of everyday animosities and how these were resolved in Italy, Germany, France and England. I’m also passionate about understanding Europe’s contribution to world history. As editor of The Cambridge World History of Violence, I explored the dark side of this. But my next book, The Invention of Civil Society, will demonstrate Europe’s more positive achievements.
I love this book because it changed the way I look at the world. It was a game changer when it was first written in French in 1949 and remains essential reading for anyone interested in European History.
Braudel offers a panoramic view of Europe’s diverse civilizations and how they were shaped by the continent’s environment and geography. Centred on the Mediterranean Braudel ranges across time and space and explores the interaction, exchange and conflict between people who lived on the sea, in the mountains and on the plain.
It remains a classic because Braudel was a rare thing among historians – he was a great writer.
The focus of Fernand Braudel's great work is the Mediterranean world in the second half of the sixteenth century, but Braudel ranges back in history to the world of Odysseus and forward to our time, moving out from the Mediterranean area to the New World and other destinations of Mediterranean traders. Braudel's scope embraces the natural world and material life, economics, demography, politics, and diplomacy.
Growing up in what was becoming Silicon Valley, I escaped to San Francisco on weekends and, through it, fell in love with what other great cities have to offer. However, as an environmental writer and TV producer there in the 1980s, I became aware of how cities exploit the territories on which they rely. A winter sojourn in the most lovely, fragile, and ingenious of all towns—Venice—in 1985 focused my too-diffuse thought on what might otherwise seem a contradiction.The lagoon cityis, as John Ruskin said, the finest book humanity has ever written; I owe it my life and the book it inspired.
This book opened my eyes to the often cataclysmic consequences of European exploration and colonization of islands and continents beyond itself, a shockwave of transformations and extinctions that have impoverished the human and biological diversity of the Earth continuing to the present.
Crosby—a pioneer of environmental history—often writes with wry humor about a very serious topic. His chapter on the invasion of the eastern Atlantic islands and its aftermath ("The Fortunate Isles") is especially good.
People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world - North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain; in many cases they were a matter of firearms against spears. But as Alfred W. Crosby maintains in this highly original and fascinating book, the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest. European organisms had certain decisive advantages over their New World and Australian counterparts. The spread of European…
I’m an awkward academic who thinks, writes, and teaches about US immigration and imprisonment regimes and their growth out of racism, imperialism, and nationalism. I’m strongly motivated by things that I hate. I want to understand how and why we are facing such catastrophic problems, so that we can figure out how to undo them. My work is partly motivated by my personal history as the daughter of immigrants who moved to support their families and survive in the aftermath of war. As a privileged person in the US, I'm not directly affected by the state violence I study. I also know that we're not going to have a future unless we get there together.
This recently published collection brings together writings by the abolitionist organizer and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who has worked against the prison industrial complex with organizations and communities for decades. On its surface, it is not a book about immigration, and yet Gilmore offers crucial insights for understanding the shifting forces in the state and capitalism that have decimated communities both within and beyond the US. Those forces have abandoned working-class communities (largely of color; see Detroit), uprooted migrants, and criminalized both, targeting them for removal—to prisons, detention centers, and deportations to other countries. Her work also gives us concrete examples of the solidarity organizing that connects different groups, whose interests might not seem to align and whose locations might be spread across distances. If the previous books clarify the roots of the problems, Gilmore not only digs even deeper, but she also shows us examples of the work needed…
Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.
Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an "anti-state state" that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes…
When I was young, my passions were flying and art. I became a pilot at age 17. Later, I became an architect, and much later, in 2000, I decided to become a fine art photographer. After ten years of shooting from the ground, I decided to take to the air again and began shooting aerial photographs, primarily of cities. I now have three aerial books published: LA NY, Thames & Hudson, Paris From the Air, Rizzoli, and London From the Air, Rizzoli. My aerial photographs are exhibited and collected throughout the world.
If you could only have one book featuring the world from above this would be it.
It’s oversize and gorgeous. Yann is the photographer who pioneered this kind of socially conscious photography. If you only looked at the pictures it would be satisfying enough, but Yann is an environmentalist, and the chapters highlight the beauty and fragility and danger of the planet we all share.
Both low- and high-level aerial photographs document places around the world and form the starting point for discussions of ecology, sustainable development, and the current state of the world.
Growing up, my father was a biologist and my mother was a children’s librarian, so I suppose it’s no surprise that I’ve become a children’s book author who writes about valuing the planet where we we live. I’ve always had a deep love of reading and some of my most cherished childhood memories are of walking through the woods behind our house, with one parent or another identifying the plants, animals, amphibians, birds, and insects that shared our land. My very first piece of writing was a poem about an owl that I wrote in first grade, and now all these years later, I’m still reading, writing, and recommending books that celebrate our marvelous world.
Believe it or not, this is a book I’ve used successfully in the classroom with teenagers!
The premise is that if we shrank the world down to just 100 people, we could then see what percentages of people shared nationalities, languages, school systems, types of jobs, etc. Or we can see who uses certain resources or has different possessions.
What I like about this book is that it’s impossible to wrap our minds around numbers in the millions and billions, but by breaking huge statistics down to just factors of 100, we can understand these concepts that illuminate how we’re sharing the planet. Kids love this book!
This is the new paperback edition of a beautiful and unique book, which explains facts about the world's population in a simple and fascinating way. Instead of unimaginable billions, it presents the whole world as a village of just 100 people. We soon find out that 22 speak a Chinese dialect and that 17 cannot read or write. We also discover the people's religions, their education, their standard of living, and much much more...This book provokes thought and elicits questions. It cannot fail to inspire children's interest in world geography, citizenship and different customs and cultures, whether they read it…
