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(More customer reviews)There are books that change the way you think about things. "Imperial San Francisco" changed the way I look at the city I live in, revealing the machinations behind the development of the Bay Area and its environs.
Brechin's book is part academic treatise, part shrill denouncement, and part insightful tell-all about America's favorite sweet-hart city. Basically, according to Brechin, a moneyed oligarchy destroyed the regional environment, poisoned our streams and wetlands, steered us towards a consumerist society dependant on fossil fuels and highways, provoked war, dumped toxic waste in workers' neighborhoods, and bought and control all significant media, all in order to make a buck. All the problems plaguing our modern society-poverty, crime, pollution, materialism-stem directly from the path of our greedy, imperial, and disgusting past.
Well researched (with occasional holes better filled by other reviewers), with plenty of gruesome anecdote and illustration, the book made my skin crawl, turned my belly aflame, and made me grit my teeth each morning as I read it on the Muni. All the passing sight from the train was just evidence of Man's greed and selfishness. What's worse, it only reminded me that the pace of our development only increases here in California.
But while Brechin was quite skillful in revealing the underbelly of San Francisco's past, his tone is grating and incessant. The book is like that obnoxious friend we all have who's politically savvy and unduly righteous. Reading the book is like being backed into a corner by this friend at a party and having to listen to all the products you should be boycotting.
And what was the alternative, after all? Certainly not the agricultural-philosophical town Brechin rhapsodizes about in the introduction. Jefferson extolled the same type of society, but his model needed slavery to uphold it, as did the Greeks', who Brechin praises as the ideal. So, after putting the book down, we're left with acrid taste in our mouths, yet no refreshing alternative with which to cleanse our palate.
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