Full name: Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas

Author: Rebecca Solnit Year: 2010 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Non Fiction, History, Travel, Essays Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780520262492 9780520262508 0520262492 0520262506

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 Gomez-Pena, 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 Similar books: Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya Season of the Witch by David Talbot Imperial San Francisco by Gray Brechin The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury Historic San Francisco by Rand Richards Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit Unfathomable City by Rebecca Solnit The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit Fugitives and Refugees by Chuck Palahniuk The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth Cafe Europa by Slavenka Drakulic Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit In Light of India by Octavio Paz The Writer and the World by V. S. Naipaul The Flaneur by Edmund White Letters from London by Julian Barnes The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson The Table Comes First by Adam Gopnik The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit