He writes a very popular history column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Gary Kamiya is the author of the #1 San Francisco bestseller Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco, which won the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction and is widely considered one of the best books ever written about San Francisco.

Handsome and irresistible-much like the city it chronicles- Spirits of San Francisco is both a visual feast and a detailed, personal, loving, informed portrait of a beloved city. And Kamiya's engaging prose, accompanying each image, offers striking vignettes of this incredible city: witness his story of “Dumpville,” the bizarre community that sprang up in the 19th century on top of a massive garbage dump.

Paul Madonna's atmospheric images will awe: his wide-angle drawings offer a new perspective on the “crookedest street in the world” and vistas across the city. Marrying image and text in a way no book about this city has done before, Kamiya's illuminating narratives accompany Madonna's masterful pen-and-ink drawings, breathing life into San Francisco sites both iconic and obscure. In Spirits of San Francisco, #1 bestselling Cool Gray City of Love author Gary Kamiya joins forces with celebrated, bestselling artist Paul Madonna to take a fresh look at this one-of-a-kind city. 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.The bestselling book from two prizewinning, critically acclaimed contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco - a rich, illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city - now in paperback. 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.įor readers of E. 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. 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. 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. 'A kaleidoscopic homage both personal and historical.

Cool gray city of love