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The Napa Valley Book: EVERYTHING You Need to Know About California's Premium Wine Country Review

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(More customer reviews)Unfortunately I found that this book was a waste of money. It was more of a address/telephone directory, rather than a travel guide. Save your money. You can find the same information online or in travel booklets that you can get upon arrival to Napa. I bought several books to prepare for my trip and this one was by far the worst. It lists addresses and telephone numbers of wineries, restaraunts and lodging with little reccomendation. I purchased this book to help me choose my itinerary and I didn't feel any more educated or informed after reading it.

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Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stone File: The Ultimate Compendium of Interviews, Articles, Facts and Opinions from the Files of Rolling Stone Review

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(More customer reviews)I got this book for Christmas and I was very hopeful that it would tell me 'The Bruce Story" since I didn't really know it. Well, it did and it didn't. Not knowing much about Springsteen's life or career and knowing only the music, reading this book, which consists of chronological news items, interviews and articles that appeared in ROLLING STONE, I got an interesting overview of his career and the way the public's perception of him has changed. The book is almost as interesting for the things it doesn't say, for instance, it says virtually nothing about the biggest event of Springsteen's career: his bitter two year battle to end his contract with Producer Mike Appel. (that is actually covered better in an out of print book you can try and order here called DOWN THUNDER ROAD) Also, his much publicized extra-marital affair with his band-member and current wife rates about 4 lines. Also, one article starts off telling us in a painfully beautiful reminisence about his early years and drops off just when things were getting interesting, way before he got signed. Overall, this book actually shows what a poor job ROLLING STONE has done over the years on all matters BRUCE. It's a good read - a must-have for completists but NOT where to begin if you have just gotten bit.

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The Rolling Stone Files is the ultimate collection of articles, facts, and opinions spanning Bruce Springsteen's entire history, featuring interviews, thoughts, and reflections from the Boss in his own words. The book is part biography, part autobiography, part insightful rock history--an incredible tribute to the Everyman of rock, one of its most beloved and enduring icons.

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Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir Review

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(More customer reviews)This is a moving and beautifully written love story by a daughter about her mother and her entire family. It is a must-read for anyone who has ever lived in proximity with someone who is 'walking wounded' as a consequence of mental illness, but is not ill enough to be hospitalized. In a most beautiful and moving way, Ms Flynn tells her story of growing up in San Francisco as her Mom descends into mental illness.
I was truly blessed with Swallow the Ocean only a few weeks after caring for and then burying a mentally ill relative who had simply worn out those who lived in closest contact with him. He couldn't help being ill; the relatives who weren't around for him could be forgiven for giving up on him. He was not easy to love.
Ms Flynn builds a bridge for us to help better understand mental illness and how families struggle to do their best under very trying circumstances.

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Red Zone: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the San Francisco Dog Mauling Review

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(More customer reviews)In one sense, Red Zone is not an easy book to read: it is, as it ought to be, a gripping but profoundly disturbing story of frightening people engaging in shocking activities. The horrible attack by dogs trained to kill, the attack that caused the death of Diane Whipple, is terrible in its own right, and the reader cannot help but feel compassion for the innocent victim. But as Aphrodite Jones reveals in her book, there many more layers to the story than there seem at first to be.
As she examines the case, Jones quickly takes one into a world that, one suspects, most readers have never imagined and could never imagine: a world in which lawyers seem to lose their bearings and come under the influence of an apparently charismatic convict already in prison yet still engaging in criminal activities. That the criminal activities engaged in by Aryan Brotherhood member Paul Schneider and lawyers Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel are by now fairly well known is due in no small part to Ms. Jones' book.
The story is presented in a clear and unaffected style that draws attention to the contents rather than to the writer. A tale of unfolding and deepening levels of horror, the book is also a readable and well-researched example of what good investigative reporting can uncover and deliver. I recommend this book. I have, in fact, recommended Red Zone in my college-level essay writing classes to students who are interested in researching current/recent events, as I have also recommended Ms. Jones' earlier book, All S/he Wanted.

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Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco Review

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(More customer reviews)There is certainly no dearth of historical work on sexuality and San Francisco, but Sides' contribution proves to be both productive and revelatory--in short, Sides has seriously moved urban and sexual history forward (he goes beyond the 1990s). And he has moved it well: Erotic City is truly a page turner!
Building on the work of historians such as Nan Boyd (see: Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965), Sides not only maps San Francisco in terms of the still-resonant political and cultural developments that have taken place there since the WWII, but he does so by bringing readers to the streets, from neighborhood to neighborhood, so that we can witness the way in which the city was shaped by its many sexual "revolutions." What's more, Sides brings "heterosexuality" back into the postwar historiography of sexual geography in an artful way--before you know it, you've been transplanted from a discussion of pornography, to leather S/M clubs, to radical feminism, so that the reading experience comes to mirror rapidly changing cityscape itself.
One of many interesting details Sides marshals (a concept which comes up only very briefly in Marc Stein's City Of Sisterly And Brotherly Loves: Lesbian And Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972) is that gay men were, for the Castro, the foot soldiers of gentrification--a point which has hitherto lacked sufficient attention in urban histories of sexuality. All told, Sides details the way in which the shifting spatial relations of power in the Erotic City were active in the production of sexuality and sexual experiences (in the most broad sense--read the book) as well as the way in which the city hosted and even created the conditions for the emergence of sexual identities, political factions, social and judicial controversies, and even revolutionary public health measures. And that emergent sexuality in turn left it's mark (for better and for worse) on the city.
All said, Erotic City is a tour-de-force tour of a city that you thought you knew.

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A Short History of San Francisco Review

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(More customer reviews)I curled up with this book shortly after I moved to San Fran (1993) and found it impossible to put down. Tom Cole ably illumines the life and times of America's oddest city. His research is exhaustive - we are early in the book given a lesson on the geologic origins of the Bay itself; which turns out to be as engrossing and ironic a tale as any from the Barbary Coast!! This is also one of the few works about San Francisco that gives the plight of Ohlone natives the attention and consideration it sorely merits. It is a mark of Cole's considerable talent that he can tell one story with such sensitivity and, just pages later, transport us quite heart-poundingly into the throes of 'one of the most rip-roaring events in human history: the California gold rush.' If you like history, or travel, or California, or San Francisco, or plain ol' good reading, 'A Short History of San Francisco' delivers exponentially more than its $12.95 pricetag's worth. Super-recommended!!

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Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer Vol. 1 (Issues 14-20) Review

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(More customer reviews)Jack Fritscher in "Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer" writes a muscular multi-faceted eyewitness history. This non-fiction work is not only fascinating for the general reader but is packed with primary sources for the researcher. Fritscher, the founding San Francisco Editor-in-Chief of "Drummer" magazine has creds. He earned his academic credentials with his PhD. He earned his authority to mine and interpret the leather past by editing "Drummer", and by his writing, including his historical novel-memoir, "Some Dance to Remember". He not only talks the talk he has also walked the walk. What was happening South of Market in the 1970s, before it was gentrified, before it became SoMa, was in the vanguard of what Fritscher calls "homomasculinity". Fritscher gathered a group of gay masculine-identified artists, photographers, cartoonists, writers around "Drummer". The group grew and flexed its muscle. They sometimes lived together, worked for and with each other, exchanged art work, picked up their tools and built their own spaces. They exchanged ideas and partied together. And yes, they sometimes had sex together. He captures it all. Fritscher writes large.

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Eyewitness Fritscher, the lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, breaks the trance of received gay history. In this timeline archive of art, sex, obscenity, gender, and gay mafia, 21st-century readers will get up to speed fast on the serious fun of who did what to whom when and why. In the Titanic 1970s, longtime Drummer editor Fritscher added erotic realism to the magical thinking of Drummer readers wanting a magazine that made newly liberated sex seem possible and accessible. Based on internal evidence in Drummer, journals, diaries, letters, photos, interviews, recordings, and newspapers, this ultimate insider s guide to the Rise and Fall of Castro and Folsom Streets is a risky ride that brings back what a thrill it was to pick up your first issue of Drummer. Fritscher s frisson anchors San Francisco s wild Gay Lib history on the clear chronology of the legendary monthly Drummer. Academia meets pop culture! Fritscher is the Ken Burns of Drummer magazine. Fritscher has done the research work most academics won t do thus ensuring that historians, critics and anthropologists will cut and paste with delight for years to come. Fritscher reads gloriously! San Francisco Chronicle

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Theatres of San Francisco (CA) (Images of America) Review

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(More customer reviews)Jack Tillmany, the author, has owned and/or managed several movie houses in the San Francisco Bay Area and is perhaps one of the best sources for photographs of theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area. This book gives at least one photo of every theater that ever operated in San Francisco (except for "storefront" theaters that was the first public outlets to show hard porn--I felt the Screening Room should have been included for historical reasons). All the Market Street houses, neighborhood theaters, "international" houses (art/foreign films have always been popular here), and even the current multiplexes. A small amount of history is included with each photograph, not an in-depth history, but a nugget of knowledge. (I would love to see a McFarland-type book on San Francisco theaters.) Many great photos, my favorite being the showing of the Howard Hughes production "The Outlaw" at the United Artists on Market Street. Highly recommended!

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Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco Review

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(More customer reviews)Judy Yung traces the social history of Chinese American women from 19th century to post World War II, how events and circumstances shape the women to be who they are today. She talks about the changing roles that these women played, from 19th century, when women played limited roles in society, how they were still influenced by traditional Chinese values to post war where they participated in the war effort, gained independence and had an active role in the society.
The main theme of this book is the discrimination they faced being Chinese and women. It is astounding to see how far they have come, from the days when Chinese school children were being called "Chinks" and were excluded from the mainstream society because of their gender and race.
This book would definitely appeal to those who come from minority communities and to those who are interested in ethnic, women or immigration history. I definitely recommend this book as it deals with issues that have so far been ignored in our textbooks, but definitely played a major role in shaping our society today.

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The crippling custom of footbinding is the thematic touchstone for Judy Yung's engrossing study of Chinese American women during the first half of the twentieth century. Using this symbol of subjugation to examine social change in the lives of these women, she shows the stages of "unbinding" that occurred in the decades between the turn of the century and the end of World War II.The setting for this captivating history is San Francisco, which had the largest Chinese population in the United States. Yung, a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco, uses an impressive range of sources to tell her story. Oral history interviews, previously unknown autobiographies, both English- and Chinese-language newspapers, government census records, and exceptional photographs from public archives and private collections combine to make this a richly human document as well as an illuminating treatise on race, gender, and class dynamics.While presenting larger social trends Yung highlights the many individual experiences of Chinese American women, and her skill as an oral history interviewer gives this work an immediacy that is poignant and effective. Her analysis of intraethnic class rifts--a major gap in ethnic history--sheds important light on the difficulties that Chinese American women faced in their own communities. Yung provides a more accurate view of their lives than has existed before, revealing the many ways that these women--rather than being passive victims of oppression--were active agents in the making of their own history.

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Mark Twain's San Francisco (California Legacy) Review

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(More customer reviews)A Santa Clara University "California Legacy Books", Mark Twain's San Francisco: Being A Generous And Uninhibited cornucopia Of Reports, Speculations, Satires, Brickbats, Musings, Topical Verse, And Other Observations by the legendary American author Samuel Clemens (known world wide by his pen name of "Mark Twain") collects anecdotes, insights, commentary, poems, and legacy of this great man and beloved author. Each writing is a few pages in length at most; all are from Twain's work for any San Francisco newspaper or journal that would pay him for his free-lance writings, from 1863 to 1866. Ably edited by journalism professor Bernard Taper, ans illustrated with rarely seen cartoons from the same era by Edward Jump, Mark Twain's San Francisco is enthusiastically recommended for literary collections featuring the work of this great American.

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"This book's time span is from the fall of 1863, when Twain began frequently making the coach trip from Virginia City down to San Francisco and contributing to San Francisco journals, to December, 1866 when he left the city to embark on the voyages out of which he would make The Innocents Abroad." The editor's purpose was "to present here simply the voice of Twain as it was to be heard at a particular time and a particular place."--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld Review

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(More customer reviews)"And Hell, yawning to receive the putrid mass, is there also".
Such is the description of San Francisco's Barbary Coast cited from another publication by author Herbert Asbury.
THE BARBARY COAST, first published in 1933, is a history of that vicious and squalid section in the heart of the City by the Bay devoted to all forms of crime, vice, lewd conduct and wickedness for the period 1849 to 1917. Asbury's fascinating narrative includes the dance halls, music saloons, dives, brothels, and gambling dens that infested the area, as well as the criminal gangs, hoodlums and cutthroats that preyed on the men lured there. The book's scope also encompasses the rising population of Chinese residents that coalesced into Chinatown, as well as the yellow slavery, tong wars and virulent anti-Chinese sentiments that evolved concurrently. And, since San Francisco is one of the world's greatest natural ports, the author describes the perils to both arriving and departing sailors, who were drawn to the Barbary Coast as insects to Venus Flytraps.
The twin pillars of the Barbary Coast were robbery and prostitution. Despite the early successes of vigilantism in ridding the burgeoning metropolis of undesirables, the fact that both thrived for so long can be attributed to the toleration and blatant corruption of the city's law enforcement officials and governing politicos. Of the two, prostitution was the foundation of the area's iniquity since, as the author is careful to point out, the Barbary Coast didn't finally die until the California Legislature passed the Red-light Abatement Act of 1914. Therefore, it's no surprise that much of the volume is dedicated to the Oldest Profession: the cribs, cow-yards, parlor houses, pimps, madames, and debasing working conditions.
THE BARBARY COAST comes near to being a book in the "couldn't put down" category. However, it sorely lacks the illustrations and period photographs that enhanced the Asbury's "prequel" volume, THE GANGS OF NEW YORK. Nevertheless, once read, you'll not see the modern streets of San Francisco in the same way again.

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San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City Review

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(More customer reviews)Anyone not already familiar with San Francisco will probably not increase his or her awareness with this book. This is an anthology that includes excerpts, essays, and poems set in, about, around, or otherwise touching on San Francisco. As such, the reader may be thrust into settings with no background, and the reader's own knowledge of and experience with The City (capital "t" capital "c", as the locals know it)will have to fill in the blanks. In some cases the writing is about SF, but in many case the writing is about a subject with SF as the backdrop. In any case, it works. As an anthology this provides a great and varied selection, and if you see any of your favorite writers in the table of contents, you may encounter a rare piece of writing that you otherwise might not (like an enjoyable Kerouac piece on a job he held for a while; something from him other than an excerpt of On The Road). Or, you may learn about an event that you otherwise know little of (the assasinations of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk). If you love The City and/or any of the selected writers, try this book. There are other books about other cities in this series (at least New Orleans and Los Angeles, I believe).

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