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City Atlases
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
What makes a place? Infinite City , Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically―connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge’s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures―butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us―or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Cartographers: Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel
Designer: Lia Tjandra
Artists: Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon, Sunaura Taylor
Writers and researchers: Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith, Richard Walker
Additional cartography: Darin Jensen; Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, San Francisco Estuary Institute
CONTRIBUTORS:
Cartographers: Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel
Designer: Lia Tjandra
Artists: Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon, Sunaura Taylor
Writers and researchers: Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith, Richard Walker
Additional cartography: Darin Jensen; Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, San Francisco Estuary Institute
157 pages, Paperback
First published October 30, 2010
92 people are currently reading
3925 people want to read
About the author
Rebecca Solnit
117 books7,995 followersWriter, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including Call Them By Their True Names (Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction), Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Hope in the Dark, and co-creator of the City of Women map, all published by Haymarket Books; a trilogy of atlases of American cities, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). Her forthcoming memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, is scheduled to release in March, 2020. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at the Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 153 reviews
February 11, 2012
I finished this a long time ago, so long that it's comfortably on the bookshelf rather than on the "been there, done that" pile next to the bed. I've withheld commentary on it because I haven't been sure how to fairly rate it.
Truly, this is a book for trainspotters -- what I mean by this is that it speaks to a certain kind of person for whom maps are a hobby, or for whom San Francisco politics are a hobby. It presumes a certain California coastal, blue-tinged worldview. And for me, the target audience, it was a delight. I love maps -- I have other entire books of maps, old maps of the world, maps of the Paris and London transport systems, and particularly, Katharine Harmon's "You Are Here," which is a book of ideas represented in maps that aren't maps. I adore San Francisco, the adopted city of this emotionally orphaned child. I lapped up the snippets of history in the prose that lashed together the maps.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Others, however, might take offense at the book's tone, one that presumes a universality of that Left Coast worldview, one that freely joins a despair in the destruction of butterfly habitat with joy in the rise of LGBT culture in the Bay Area.
"Infinite City" doesn't so much preach as it assumes. The book should be approached in this way -- much more political than suggested by the reviews I've seen, but a delight for those who are expecting and appreciating a like-minded tome.
Truly, this is a book for trainspotters -- what I mean by this is that it speaks to a certain kind of person for whom maps are a hobby, or for whom San Francisco politics are a hobby. It presumes a certain California coastal, blue-tinged worldview. And for me, the target audience, it was a delight. I love maps -- I have other entire books of maps, old maps of the world, maps of the Paris and London transport systems, and particularly, Katharine Harmon's "You Are Here," which is a book of ideas represented in maps that aren't maps. I adore San Francisco, the adopted city of this emotionally orphaned child. I lapped up the snippets of history in the prose that lashed together the maps.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Others, however, might take offense at the book's tone, one that presumes a universality of that Left Coast worldview, one that freely joins a despair in the destruction of butterfly habitat with joy in the rise of LGBT culture in the Bay Area.
"Infinite City" doesn't so much preach as it assumes. The book should be approached in this way -- much more political than suggested by the reviews I've seen, but a delight for those who are expecting and appreciating a like-minded tome.
April 23, 2011
I just started this book and it is amazing. The maps alone merit five stars -- modern works of art that will melt your mind. Everyone who loves San Francisco, who loves the art of the book, will love this one.
February 7, 2017
A historical/literary/spiritual/geographical/trivial/racial/ecological/artistic/zoological/industrial/culinary/personal/artistic/murderous/entomological atlas of my first and still dear cool gray city of love. A terrific idea--most salient feature is the originality of the concept, so good you can't imagine why no one thought of it before, why there aren't versions for every city you love--brought to a successful realization. Willfully a patchwork it's by nature uneven, bumpy, collaborative, unsatisfying (vol. II!), informative, nostalgic, fascinating, and especially charming--all ways I would describe the city it mimics, charts, pays homage to, loves, derides, chides, denudes, cannot begin to encapsulate, and stands beside. I loved it.
P.S. In the notebook containing some of the stories I collected into my second book, Poison and Antidote I glued in a map of San Francisco and charted, using different colored felt tipped pens, the movements of my characters across the city, noting (literally) their movements and found a new level of meaning beneath the narrative, across the map. This is a whole new genre.
P.S. In the notebook containing some of the stories I collected into my second book, Poison and Antidote I glued in a map of San Francisco and charted, using different colored felt tipped pens, the movements of my characters across the city, noting (literally) their movements and found a new level of meaning beneath the narrative, across the map. This is a whole new genre.
April 18, 2020
This collection recalls the unjustified exuberance I felt through my teens and university years whenever I got off the SF Caltrain on 4th and King. The maps are beautiful but the standard deviation of essay quality is large.
July 27, 2022
Maps are works of art! Read this in preparation for making maps similar to this for work & future participatory mapping exercises, but this would be a fun hobby project to make maps for places that matter to me. Yet another academic book that is also a niche interest.
March 29, 2012
Infinite City is a bizarre and intriguing look at the many dimensions of San Francisco. The book is composed of 22 different maps of the city, each dealing with different phenomena specific to the city on the Bay. These range from Map 6: "Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces", to Map 16: "Death and Beauty: All of 2008's Ninety-nine Murders, Some of 2009's Monterey Cypresses." Solnit's writing is clean, thought-provoking, and complex. Several contributing writers add their personalities and insights to the maps as well, providing a well-rounded, albeit slightly odd, analysis of San Francisco's character. One doesn't need to be hugely familiar with the city to enjoy the creativity and writing here, but San Francisco fans will obviously find it to be a most compelling adventure. My favorite atlas: "Phrenological San Francisco."
May 27, 2011
I had high expectations for this one. But, overall: brilliantly creative conceit; uneven, at times disappointing, writing. On the physical side of things, the beautiful maps constantly fell into the no-man's-land of the gutter (not good for an "atlas"); nice trim, paper, and design, though.
February 12, 2018
According to the receipt that fell out of this book, I bought it on July 26, 2013 at City Lights. It was three days after my 32nd birthday and presumably a Friday because every Friday for about a year I would visit my therapist in her office across Columbus from City Lights. Every Friday I pedaled my bike the five or six miles along the Bay from my office in Bayview, watching the city transform from neglected future redevelopment hotspot in the shadow of the dismantled skeleton of Candlestick to the postindustrial docks of the Dogpatch, skirting the edge of Mission Bay (so shiny and threatening at the time of this book's writing) before taking the former freeway of the Embarcadero up until my left turn into North Beach, my last few pedalstrokes in low gear uphill until I locked my bike outside of the Hustler Club and walked up the stairs to find some measure of healing.
I have loved maps for a long time and I love how Solnit and her compatriots took me on a journey through time and space in that city I loved so much and left for another love. Even opening it took me on my own journey through the city, the map of discoveries external and internal, the cartography of connection.
I have loved maps for a long time and I love how Solnit and her compatriots took me on a journey through time and space in that city I loved so much and left for another love. Even opening it took me on my own journey through the city, the map of discoveries external and internal, the cartography of connection.
October 30, 2024
I ❤️ Rebecca Solnit. I ❤️ San Francisco. And I ❤️ atlases. So rich so informative I feel even more connected to my city and home having read it
June 4, 2012
idiosyncratic maps of the bay area by master writer and thinker solnit A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland Wanderlust: A History of Walking River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West here she maps and essays things like coffee shops, murders, greenspaces, fillmore neighborhood, mission district, queers, butterflys, the old waterfront, food and superfund sites (silicon valley has the most, oops) . the maps themselves are quirky and more artistic than a "normal" map but the essays explain who and or what is being mapped and she has lots of help with over 20 collaborators. very exciting read for san francisco lovers, and very thoughtful and intriguing for those who want to be.
June 24, 2011
I just hate San Francisco too much as a place. I couldn't turn the corner to where I could disconnect myself from this fact. The book just seems to feed into the city's ego. I know "The City" aims to be a world class city on par with great cities everywhere, but really it just doesn't have the dimensions of a Los Angeles or even an Atlanta, so for me, I guess I just didn't need this book, just like I didn't need all those parking tickets in the Haight.
July 3, 2017
This book strikes me as too original to confine to any one of my shelves, although it will probably live next to her book about walking. It's odd shape will make moving both of them to another area of my library, consonant with the history of walking and remapping the Bay Area, particularly San Francisco. I lived there for well over twenty years and my own history of walking every street in San Francisco, aided by a AAA map makes for a different view of the place, but that is what Solnit encourages, the personal encounter with geography, the sense of place. Most of the places she emntions that are within my span I remember, but returning to "The City" these days creates a chronic sense of disorientation because of the numerous changes in recent years. A city through someone else's eyes is like a foreign exchange visit.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is considering visiting San Francisco because it balances the Wharf excursion mentality. Much of the joy of living there is the ability to sample the cultural neighborhoods, but the last tiem I visited North Beach I was reminded of a theme park more that anything else-too many places have closed, although Cafe Trieste, City Lights and Valsuvius remain. My beloved Mission district has become an echo of the gormet ghetto of Berkeley, patrolled by Google vans. It onc sported a dozen women owned businesses, the socialist bookstore, a culture that mixed with the local Latin scene with an unexpected grace. Modern Times, the bookstore was where I saw Solnit discussing the Wanderlust, which had become a Penguin book. It closed last year, according to the Internet. Everything about San francisco seems transitory, except that it remains a horizon of events. Which brings us to the point of the book-the map is also ever changing according to the values of the cartographer, and as shaped by the navigator. There are far too many highlights in this book to create a brief treasure map of my own, but I found her reflections on the so called radical political history of the area contrasted with the military industrial economy particularly enlightening. Rober Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island appears near the end of the book, a history I had no inkling of, although Stevenson street is well known for his brief stay. The book in part makes me want to generate my own map of the city, seen through my veil of memory, to revisit it and see the sites I missed, and another part of me wants to stay home to explore my new city, which I have yet to fall in love.
This book has inspired my local writing center to assign similar mapping projects, and it is said that Solnit will travel elsewhere, perhaps to New Orleans to map that city so altered by Katrina. There is something about living on the coasts, living on the verges of natural disaster like earthwuakes, hurricanes that gives a high life edge to things, ports that make influx and transition a natural ebb and flow. It used to be easy to viw maps as a stable thing, a weird blothcy patter on of color on the grade school wall, but suddenly through recent readings their fluid nature has become much clearere.
I highly recommend this book, despite my disastifaction with this higly subjective review.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is considering visiting San Francisco because it balances the Wharf excursion mentality. Much of the joy of living there is the ability to sample the cultural neighborhoods, but the last tiem I visited North Beach I was reminded of a theme park more that anything else-too many places have closed, although Cafe Trieste, City Lights and Valsuvius remain. My beloved Mission district has become an echo of the gormet ghetto of Berkeley, patrolled by Google vans. It onc sported a dozen women owned businesses, the socialist bookstore, a culture that mixed with the local Latin scene with an unexpected grace. Modern Times, the bookstore was where I saw Solnit discussing the Wanderlust, which had become a Penguin book. It closed last year, according to the Internet. Everything about San francisco seems transitory, except that it remains a horizon of events. Which brings us to the point of the book-the map is also ever changing according to the values of the cartographer, and as shaped by the navigator. There are far too many highlights in this book to create a brief treasure map of my own, but I found her reflections on the so called radical political history of the area contrasted with the military industrial economy particularly enlightening. Rober Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island appears near the end of the book, a history I had no inkling of, although Stevenson street is well known for his brief stay. The book in part makes me want to generate my own map of the city, seen through my veil of memory, to revisit it and see the sites I missed, and another part of me wants to stay home to explore my new city, which I have yet to fall in love.
This book has inspired my local writing center to assign similar mapping projects, and it is said that Solnit will travel elsewhere, perhaps to New Orleans to map that city so altered by Katrina. There is something about living on the coasts, living on the verges of natural disaster like earthwuakes, hurricanes that gives a high life edge to things, ports that make influx and transition a natural ebb and flow. It used to be easy to viw maps as a stable thing, a weird blothcy patter on of color on the grade school wall, but suddenly through recent readings their fluid nature has become much clearere.
I highly recommend this book, despite my disastifaction with this higly subjective review.
February 23, 2019
I love Rebecca Solnit’s imagination, turn of phrase and conceptualization. This project features all three, but the first most of all. This is a collection of essays created in support and analysis of the various maps Solnit and others construct to familiarize oneself with some of the many (arguably infinite) ways to experience San Francisco.
Solnit has create pairings of conceptually related subjects to focus the creation of a single map representing the intersection of the two . For example, she pairs butterfly habitats and queer public spaces for her map of “monarchs and queens.” Twenty-two maps, forty-four concepts, one infinite city just beginning to be mapped.
Very post-modern cool.
Solnit has create pairings of conceptually related subjects to focus the creation of a single map representing the intersection of the two . For example, she pairs butterfly habitats and queer public spaces for her map of “monarchs and queens.” Twenty-two maps, forty-four concepts, one infinite city just beginning to be mapped.
Very post-modern cool.
December 26, 2021
My San Francisco book binge continues. I enjoyed this: the artwork was great and the essays were mostly interesting. Some of the connections drawn felt a little flimsy, but I understood the intention. I was most drawn to the neighborhood-level maps, especially the Mission and Fillmore ones. The essay about the convention center and Yerba Buena area was really eye-opening.
The political message of this book is unclear at points, and very "Gen X."
The political message of this book is unclear at points, and very "Gen X."
February 19, 2017
I had looked at the maps before, but I finally took the time to read the essays - just delightful. She's very clever - I hear she'd doing similar ones for other cities.
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October 31, 2011View in catalog here: http://haines.evergreencatalog.com/op...
October 2011
Each one of us has maps inside of us. These maps make up our own personal atlas, and they include the daily routes we take, the many places (and people connected with those places) we've visited and loved, as well as the unique interests we seek out in the world in things like art museums, libraries, beaches, and mountains. In Infinite City, a wonderful reworking of the traditional atlas, Rebecca Solnit invites us to ponder our own maps and places while she and the artists and cartographers she worked with reveal 22 breathtaking personal maps of San Francisco.
In my favorite map of the book, Solnit lays out the places in San Francisco where Eadweard Muybridge - the inventor of motion pictures - lived and wandered. Overlaid on the same map are the places where the famous Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo (and one of my favorite movies) was filmed. Other maps include Zen Buddhist centers and salmon streams, sites important to Queer history and locations once (or still) inhabited by rare butterflies, coffee shops and San Francisco's water sources, and so on. Each map is accompanied by an illuminating essay, and Solnit's introduction is a testament to the power of maps.
I read this book out in the wilderness of Chilkat Lake, but was instantly transported to San Francisco. Fans of maps, imagination, and San Francisco, don't miss this one.
-Janine A.
October 2011
Each one of us has maps inside of us. These maps make up our own personal atlas, and they include the daily routes we take, the many places (and people connected with those places) we've visited and loved, as well as the unique interests we seek out in the world in things like art museums, libraries, beaches, and mountains. In Infinite City, a wonderful reworking of the traditional atlas, Rebecca Solnit invites us to ponder our own maps and places while she and the artists and cartographers she worked with reveal 22 breathtaking personal maps of San Francisco.
In my favorite map of the book, Solnit lays out the places in San Francisco where Eadweard Muybridge - the inventor of motion pictures - lived and wandered. Overlaid on the same map are the places where the famous Alfred Hitchcock film Vertigo (and one of my favorite movies) was filmed. Other maps include Zen Buddhist centers and salmon streams, sites important to Queer history and locations once (or still) inhabited by rare butterflies, coffee shops and San Francisco's water sources, and so on. Each map is accompanied by an illuminating essay, and Solnit's introduction is a testament to the power of maps.
I read this book out in the wilderness of Chilkat Lake, but was instantly transported to San Francisco. Fans of maps, imagination, and San Francisco, don't miss this one.
-Janine A.
July 3, 2019
Like any collection of essays, some are hits and some are misses. The best ones aren’t concerned with explaining why every detail on the map has been included, but rather step back to say something more fundamental about the beauty of cities through the particular lens and history of San Francisco. The essays in this collection not to be missed:
•Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II
•Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone
•Graveyard Shift: The Lost Industrial City of 1960
•The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe
And from the introduction, a beautiful fragment:
“A book is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds. A city itself strikes me at times as a sort of library, folding many phenomena into one dense space. . . I came home to San Francisco and wrote in delight: ‘Every building, every storefront seemed to open onto a different world, compressing all the variety of human life into a jumble of conjunctions. Just as a bookshelf can jam together wildly different books, each book a small box opening onto a different world, so seemed the buildings of my city: every row of houses and shops brought near many kinds of abundance, opened onto many mysteries: crack houses, zen centers, gospel churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, movie palaces, dim sum shops.’”
•Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II
•Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone
•Graveyard Shift: The Lost Industrial City of 1960
•The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe
And from the introduction, a beautiful fragment:
“A book is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds. A city itself strikes me at times as a sort of library, folding many phenomena into one dense space. . . I came home to San Francisco and wrote in delight: ‘Every building, every storefront seemed to open onto a different world, compressing all the variety of human life into a jumble of conjunctions. Just as a bookshelf can jam together wildly different books, each book a small box opening onto a different world, so seemed the buildings of my city: every row of houses and shops brought near many kinds of abundance, opened onto many mysteries: crack houses, zen centers, gospel churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, movie palaces, dim sum shops.’”
September 7, 2013
The book drew me in with its artwork and promise of new visions of the familiar. The art - the maps and other illustrations - are all lovely and well placed given the text either selected by or written by Ms. Solnit.
The work fails, at least for me, by attempting to infuse too much meaning, or too much feeling into an event/place. This was bluntly true with the essay on evictions in the Tenderloin and the "what happened to al the black folks" essays/maps.
The trouble is how Ms. Solnit accepts/speaks as a transplant to San Francisco. At times, this brings value as is wont to happen when an outsider lets the native have a second look. But, as a transplant of multiple decades, (she's been a resident since she was 20) she falls too often into explanations of why she came/why she stayed. It colors her text with platitudes and whining which in essence come off to me as "i did not originate here, but I've got the left-liberal politics to fit in" or "see, I'm one of you now." Tone it down please! The reader is not in to revoker her residency or challenge her right to stay. Please stop trying so hard to prove you belong. It hurts!!
The work fails, at least for me, by attempting to infuse too much meaning, or too much feeling into an event/place. This was bluntly true with the essay on evictions in the Tenderloin and the "what happened to al the black folks" essays/maps.
The trouble is how Ms. Solnit accepts/speaks as a transplant to San Francisco. At times, this brings value as is wont to happen when an outsider lets the native have a second look. But, as a transplant of multiple decades, (she's been a resident since she was 20) she falls too often into explanations of why she came/why she stayed. It colors her text with platitudes and whining which in essence come off to me as "i did not originate here, but I've got the left-liberal politics to fit in" or "see, I'm one of you now." Tone it down please! The reader is not in to revoker her residency or challenge her right to stay. Please stop trying so hard to prove you belong. It hurts!!
April 30, 2013
If you live in San Francisco and haven't seen this book, then you must certainly do your book shopping online. It has been everywhere for the past year – and rightly so. Combining maps and prose to show different perspectives on the Bay Area – it nicely maneuvers among the physical, historical, cultural, and contextual worlds. The atlas could easily be a museum exhibit.
The maps and stories juxtapose themes – such as shipyards and jazz/soul landmarks. While some of the combinations of stories and maps, and some of the writing, leave something to be desired – the maps and the stories they tell are fantastic. They serve as a reminder of the power of what maps do beyond providing geographic information, they are powerful cultural artifacts.
With San Francisco being a destination for the young and constructive, there is a perpetual newness in the air – and very few recognize the history beyond an earthquake and some hippies. This is must have book for the explorers of San Francisco – it would be great to have one for other great cities.
The maps and stories juxtapose themes – such as shipyards and jazz/soul landmarks. While some of the combinations of stories and maps, and some of the writing, leave something to be desired – the maps and the stories they tell are fantastic. They serve as a reminder of the power of what maps do beyond providing geographic information, they are powerful cultural artifacts.
With San Francisco being a destination for the young and constructive, there is a perpetual newness in the air – and very few recognize the history beyond an earthquake and some hippies. This is must have book for the explorers of San Francisco – it would be great to have one for other great cities.
May 11, 2019
This is one of the loveliest books I have ever read. I wasn't looking for a tourist guide on San Francisco and I didn't want a work of fiction. I wanted to see San Francisco and it's rise and fall from power and culture through Maps. This is exactly what this book is about. It tells the story of San Francisco through the lens of 22 beautifully drawn maps and intricate prose to go with it. Even the way the book is bound, the cardboard-like cover, the interesting drawings and even the unusual perpectives included, are all a creative works of art. My favorite map is Monarchs (butterflies) and Queens (gay bars). The story of individuals, unfolding their wings, coming out of their cocoons and being who they were meant to be in all their glory, gave me chills on how the authors could weave two entities so unseemingly related in San Francisco.
I recommend this book for anyone who loves San Francisco Or who wants to see her in a different creative light.
I recommend this book for anyone who loves San Francisco Or who wants to see her in a different creative light.
March 2, 2013
This was such a delightful read. The maps were gorgeous and well-themed, e.g. "Poison / Palate," a map of the toxic waste of the bay area with the culinary hot spots. I expected to like the maps, but having never read Solnit before I didn't expect the beauty of her prose. When reading her introduction, specifically her writing about maps, I was impressed by the transcendence of her writing and her understanding of what a map is and what a map can't be. I would have loved this book anyway, but when I noticed that several people I worked with and a former professor were all involved or mentioned I knew it would become a treasure.
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August 29, 2011This seems like a great book. But not for me at this time in my life.
I'm not able to read much, and I got this to look at pretty maps. There's not that many maps, and there's walls and walls of text. It looks like interesting text, but my brain can't handle it right now.
This would be a great gift for someone who loves San Francisco: the history, the diversity, the micro-cultures, atlases, and of course maps.
I'm not able to read much, and I got this to look at pretty maps. There's not that many maps, and there's walls and walls of text. It looks like interesting text, but my brain can't handle it right now.
This would be a great gift for someone who loves San Francisco: the history, the diversity, the micro-cultures, atlases, and of course maps.
July 25, 2014
No doubt it helps being a native of San Francisco, but I loved this. A brilliantly imaginative way of thinking about the physical city. The real stars of the show here are the maps, which layer and juxtapose unexpected sets of data: butterfly habitats and queer landmarks, for example, or sites from early motion picture pioneer Eadweard Muybridge's life and locations of Hitchock's Vertigo, or toxic waste sites and gourmet food destinations. Very cool.
July 27, 2015
I'd really like to give this book 3.5 stars. Goodreads feature request? My expectations were so high for this book (hey Rebecca Solnit), but some of the essays were a little too preachy and nostalgic for the "golden years" for me. The essay about the Mission was my favourite, and the last one about San Francisco treasures made me excited to go exploring. I just wish I'd felt that way more consistently through the book.
January 30, 2014
Maybe it has been too long since I've tried to use a paper atlas, but this book's maps seemed disjointed, cluttered, even forced. The writing was all over the place, often hard to follow. I also found that the subjects covered were very interesting, but I felt the format was often inappropriate and left me unsatisfied, even confused and searching. Disappointing overall.
August 13, 2014
Beguiling and unlike anything I've read. Loved it.
September 7, 2016
One of the best books I've read in a while, 6 stars if I could
December 31, 2019
This is a book that I want to like unreservedly, but find a little challenging at times. It’s beautiful in places, a bit precious here and there, and yet strangely appealing overall. It’s a collection of lovely maps that plat out locations you didn’t know about, concepts you haven’t heard, and ideas that need a place, but aren’t linked to a point in space the way they should. Some maps to give you the notion: “The names before the name: The indigenous Bay Area, 1769” or “Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces.”
It’s a brilliant idea for a book—a kind of geography of the San Franciscan mind, focusing in tightly on histories and forgotten ideas (like the play-by-play detail of the Fillmore Street over the past 100 years, from a place that received the rubble of 1906 earthquake to a place where Beats like Allen Ginsberg hung out and read “Howl” in public for the first time, to a place with the Church of St. John Coltrane and a kind of black Renaissance) AND on the larger geopolitical issues that have swirled here since time began. It’s a landscape of whalers, 49ers (the gold-rush-boys), rancho-era land grants, poverty, wealth, queer society, shellmounds, canning factories, sports teams, the places of chocolate, coffee, shipping, and finance.
It’s also an impossible book to summarize. There aren’t chapters, but MAPS as the key organizer, with essays providing the story for the places. (They’re mostly by Solnit, but with several others joining into the cartological song. Maps and artwork within are by a number of well-known mappers and artists, or perhaps artists and mappers—it’s unclear that there is a leading voice.)
Maps + chapters about industry, but also about cultural identity, especially as seen through a historical and geographical lens. Maps + chapters that cover the 49 square miles of terra infirma, what the tides brought, and what the landowners have taken away.
I DO love this book, but the tone of some of the essays gets a little preachy, but if that doesn’t derail you, the overall effect of the book is to give a deep and rich sense of San Francisco geo-history in a way that no other book does. (You gotta love a book with a chapter entitled “The smell of ten thousand gallons of mayonnaise and a hundred tons of coffee” that portrays the titanic shift of the piers and shipping industry that not-so-long-ago defined San Franciscso commerce.)
Fascinating book. The extended subtitle really says it all. After “A San Francisco Atlas” the sub-sub-title is…
“… of Principal landmarks and treasures of the region, including butterfly species, queer sites, murders, coffee, water, power, contingent identities, social types, libraries, early-morning bars, the lost labor landscape of 1960, and the monumental Monterey cypresses of San Francisco; of indigenous place names, women environmentalists, toxins, food sites, right-wing organizations, World War II shipyards, Zen Buddhist center, salmon migration, and musical histories of the Bay area; with details of cultural geographies of the Mission District, the Fillmore’s culture wars and metamorphoses, the racial discourses of United Nations Plaza, the South of Market world that redevelopment devoured, and other significant phenomena, vanished and extant.”
Got all that? It’s all here for your edification. Come to be immersed…
It’s a brilliant idea for a book—a kind of geography of the San Franciscan mind, focusing in tightly on histories and forgotten ideas (like the play-by-play detail of the Fillmore Street over the past 100 years, from a place that received the rubble of 1906 earthquake to a place where Beats like Allen Ginsberg hung out and read “Howl” in public for the first time, to a place with the Church of St. John Coltrane and a kind of black Renaissance) AND on the larger geopolitical issues that have swirled here since time began. It’s a landscape of whalers, 49ers (the gold-rush-boys), rancho-era land grants, poverty, wealth, queer society, shellmounds, canning factories, sports teams, the places of chocolate, coffee, shipping, and finance.
It’s also an impossible book to summarize. There aren’t chapters, but MAPS as the key organizer, with essays providing the story for the places. (They’re mostly by Solnit, but with several others joining into the cartological song. Maps and artwork within are by a number of well-known mappers and artists, or perhaps artists and mappers—it’s unclear that there is a leading voice.)
Maps + chapters about industry, but also about cultural identity, especially as seen through a historical and geographical lens. Maps + chapters that cover the 49 square miles of terra infirma, what the tides brought, and what the landowners have taken away.
I DO love this book, but the tone of some of the essays gets a little preachy, but if that doesn’t derail you, the overall effect of the book is to give a deep and rich sense of San Francisco geo-history in a way that no other book does. (You gotta love a book with a chapter entitled “The smell of ten thousand gallons of mayonnaise and a hundred tons of coffee” that portrays the titanic shift of the piers and shipping industry that not-so-long-ago defined San Franciscso commerce.)
Fascinating book. The extended subtitle really says it all. After “A San Francisco Atlas” the sub-sub-title is…
“… of Principal landmarks and treasures of the region, including butterfly species, queer sites, murders, coffee, water, power, contingent identities, social types, libraries, early-morning bars, the lost labor landscape of 1960, and the monumental Monterey cypresses of San Francisco; of indigenous place names, women environmentalists, toxins, food sites, right-wing organizations, World War II shipyards, Zen Buddhist center, salmon migration, and musical histories of the Bay area; with details of cultural geographies of the Mission District, the Fillmore’s culture wars and metamorphoses, the racial discourses of United Nations Plaza, the South of Market world that redevelopment devoured, and other significant phenomena, vanished and extant.”
Got all that? It’s all here for your edification. Come to be immersed…
October 27, 2022
Don't get me wrong, this is a good book (and 3 starts are actually a good rating imo). The author is clearly someone who loves the city and spend a lot of time collecting the stories about the it, putting together the narrative and assigning it to the city's landscape.
Yes, not all the stories are equally interesting and exciting. And I think a couple of good ones were missed. Some neighborhoods didn't get enough attention, although they went through a dramatic changes in XX century.
The big drawback of this book - a typical SF-based political thinking that is embedded into literally every chapter. All the stories about "old good working class city that was took over by tech workers and not there anymore".
While I certainly can relate to the fact that changes might be depressing, and the city used to be different, there is an absolute lack of understanding of what the blue-collar working life is.
Apparently, contrary to the author I grew up in a blue-collar family. I actually do know what toll it take on a man performing manual labor all his life - something Rebecca Solnit chose to hide beneath the picture of "old good days, when people were open, honest, trees were taller and grass was greener". The only thing my father was telling all the time since I was maybe 5: "Study well, go to college, get a degree and then a normal job. No construction, no blue-collar, no manual labor. Do what it takes to stay away from it".
This is a sad example of typical, Californian, white, privileged woman who had enough money and resources to study in Paris when she was 17, while other people were carrying sacks of potatoes on their back during their summer breaks. And now she grieves the "blue-collar city that disappeared".
Does she just want me to work in construction as my dad did his whole life, and continue to carry those sacks of potatoes on weekends and vacations so she can just enjoy her "city of childhood" while writing something about feminism and activism. It's a shame.
Yes, not all the stories are equally interesting and exciting. And I think a couple of good ones were missed. Some neighborhoods didn't get enough attention, although they went through a dramatic changes in XX century.
The big drawback of this book - a typical SF-based political thinking that is embedded into literally every chapter. All the stories about "old good working class city that was took over by tech workers and not there anymore".
While I certainly can relate to the fact that changes might be depressing, and the city used to be different, there is an absolute lack of understanding of what the blue-collar working life is.
Skills that the working class used to vault into the middle class during past half-century have been systematically eliminated by the inexorable "progress" of capitalism: the substitution of technology for human labor and the deskilling of the workers who remain, all while the system's proponents claim that we need more education and training to function in the high-tech world of today.
The truth is that we're drowning in busywork, nonproductive work, everything from "creative" banking and insurance bureaucracies to the pointless shuffling of data...
Apparently, contrary to the author I grew up in a blue-collar family. I actually do know what toll it take on a man performing manual labor all his life - something Rebecca Solnit chose to hide beneath the picture of "old good days, when people were open, honest, trees were taller and grass was greener". The only thing my father was telling all the time since I was maybe 5: "Study well, go to college, get a degree and then a normal job. No construction, no blue-collar, no manual labor. Do what it takes to stay away from it".
This is a sad example of typical, Californian, white, privileged woman who had enough money and resources to study in Paris when she was 17, while other people were carrying sacks of potatoes on their back during their summer breaks. And now she grieves the "blue-collar city that disappeared".
Does she just want me to work in construction as my dad did his whole life, and continue to carry those sacks of potatoes on weekends and vacations so she can just enjoy her "city of childhood" while writing something about feminism and activism. It's a shame.
November 23, 2021
Read a long time ago.
Essayist Rebecca Solnit, working with different cartographers, artists, and writers, looks at San Francisco through twenty-two unique maps with accompanying essays. The first essay “The Names before the Names,” lays the groundwork along with a map of San Francisco circa 1769 which shows a scattering of Spanish missions and a wide distribution of various tribes. The author explains how the tribes named one another. Yelamu meant “northerners” to one group and “westerners” to another because of their relationship geographically. It was the missionaries who chose fixed names to designate a people and ignored their relational context. Other essays and maps are just as fascinating: one overlays the life of Edward Muybridge (a pioneer of moving pictures who lived in the city), Alfred Hitchcock’s love letter to San Francisco (*Vertigo*), and all the movie theaters in the city in 1958 (the film’s release date). The author describes Muybridge's storied life in San Francisco, including a murder trial that sent him into exile to Central America where he figured out some key elements in film-making. Another juxtaposes Superfund sites and the locations of major chemical companies with locavore ranches and wineries.
Amazing, lovely book.
Essayist Rebecca Solnit, working with different cartographers, artists, and writers, looks at San Francisco through twenty-two unique maps with accompanying essays. The first essay “The Names before the Names,” lays the groundwork along with a map of San Francisco circa 1769 which shows a scattering of Spanish missions and a wide distribution of various tribes. The author explains how the tribes named one another. Yelamu meant “northerners” to one group and “westerners” to another because of their relationship geographically. It was the missionaries who chose fixed names to designate a people and ignored their relational context. Other essays and maps are just as fascinating: one overlays the life of Edward Muybridge (a pioneer of moving pictures who lived in the city), Alfred Hitchcock’s love letter to San Francisco (*Vertigo*), and all the movie theaters in the city in 1958 (the film’s release date). The author describes Muybridge's storied life in San Francisco, including a murder trial that sent him into exile to Central America where he figured out some key elements in film-making. Another juxtaposes Superfund sites and the locations of major chemical companies with locavore ranches and wineries.
Amazing, lovely book.
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