Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

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 to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End. 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.

Reader Fit: Perfect for readers who love cities, local history, and thoughtful nonfiction that uncovers the stories hidden beneath familiar places.

Why We Carry It: We carry Cool Gray City of Love because it reveals San Francisco through the lives, histories, and communities that have shaped it. As a Bay Area bookstore, we believe understanding where we live begins with understanding the people and stories that came before us.