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When I moved into San Francisco, I asked some people on the books, that I should read to get a sense of the history of the city. Here is a sample of the books I have read since then, gathered in one place for the next time someone asks me the question. I am always open to more suggestions and suggestions not necessarily on the city as a whole - for example, my book preferred on New York was in large part on the traffic and my book preferred on Boston was on the River.
In fact publish this post, moons after writing is mainly in honour of spectacular weather of today and my first ever bike ride across the Golden Gate. (And Yes, the photo is clichée and I don't care point)
Imperial San Francisco: Urban power, Earth's ruin: Gray Brechin: this book opens with a conspiracy theory a little weird on the role of mining in the history and keeps going with a lot of implied "the rich seek to maintain us in the position" without much evidence. Not that the people that it is chronic are particularly pleasant people, but is quite easy to prove without going off the coast of the deep end on this subject. Despite this unfortunate trend, this book has many great stories and information on how the proponents of the power of San Francisco at the end of the 19th century interrelated with city, State, and the rest of the country, including some great background on the history of the water and mining in the region. Recommended for someone reading attempts to get an understanding on the history of SF, although with an order from the salt.
City of infinity, Atlas of San Francisco, Rebeca Solnit: it is an atlas in the same way one hundred years of Solitude is the story of a village. I.e. It covers history, so much so, in many crazy ways and is therefore unlike other history or map you have ever seen, it becomes very difficult to summarize. Perhaps not for everyone, either, but something, I like and think that is flipping through that wants to find the stories that can bring a city to life.
Golden Gate: The life and more great bridge time to America, Kevin Starr: Starr is a great historian (his most serious history in California books are fantastic), and this book has a lot of great stories. Unfortunately, there also many filling to make "the length of the book". (In the future, books like this are approximately 1/2 length and sold exclusively as ebooks.) I recommend, if you are interested in the bridge and have time to browse a few prose enough purple and foreign. If you are simply looking for a particular book on the city, is not it.
San Francisco making American: cultural frontiers in the urban West, 1846-1906, Barbara Berglund: this started as a doctoral thesis and reads like one. But if you are the kind of person who can dive in this way (and I am), this is a brilliant book, explaining how mixed and approximately equal of the mines-era SF culture been gradually moulded into something acceptable "cultures" Americans - both for the new rich of the West who wanted to build an acceptable city to East and those of is which have been flooding in SF really fascinating lireet I think has some lessons applicable to "uncultivated" programmers who have constantly the cultural change of resist imposed by more "refined" outsiders-still a current theme in SF.
The Barbary plague: the black plague in Victorian San Francisco by Marilyn Chase: this book explores the history of the entry of the bubonic plague in the Americas, through San Francisco. It is a lighter and more thematically consistent that make the American of San Francisco, but covers overlap of time periods and explores similar themes, such as early anti-Chinese racism and the relationship of early San Francisco with the United States Eastern. If you are looking for something less serious, and not at all on the software, this is certainly a book in this list to read.
Disappeared from the waters: A history of San Francisco's Mission Bay, Nancy Olmsted: I live on land reclaimed from Mission Bay, so it has resonance for me that it is probably for others. But I think that this is a brilliant, brief book that anyone who lives near modern Caltrain should benefit from reading, since it will help understand the geography and history of your own neighborhood.
What the Dormouse said: how the sixties counterculture in the form of the personal computer, by John Markoff. and the regional advantage: Culture and competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, AnnaLee Saxenian: I think that these as a pair, because all the very different books that they are also both on the culture of innovation for computing and networking in the Valley. Garden Dormouse is really very anecdotal (a small birdie once told me that even the author admits that it was essentially an excuse to string together a bunch of great stories he had heard over the years), but they are great stories and great chewing, especially in view of the success of the iPhone and iPad after writing the book, and the tension continues between custom and centralized computing. Regional advantage is a book still more ancient, but essential to understand the causes more large, structural Silicon Valley success, showing that it has increased between companies sharing that makes Silicon Valley continue to succeed after the shocks of the 1980s and interpersonal hammered Silicon Valley and Boston Route 128.
Recovery of San Francisco: Brook, Carlsson and Peters: not really read yet, but am very happy to find the time for it. It is a series of tests.
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 18, 2011 at 19: 21 and is filed under staff, BGP, San Francisco. You can follow your comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or a trackback from your own site.
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"Thank you note for each language," by woodleywonderworks, used under CC - BY 2.0.First, Gerv Markham. GERV has many ways central to the mission of open source Mozilla for some time and it would have been easy for him to feel threatened when I dropped by parachute and began working on the licence. Instead, it has been helpful, patient and constructive - everything you would want a team member and co-worker.
Small waterfall on the side of a trail off the coast of the Skyline Drive, Virginia, may 2011
Pas de chaque entreprise sur la capitale, par Fligtar, utilisée sous CC-BY-NC-SA
Fine Print by CJ Sorg, used under CC - BY 2.0