Cool Grey City of Lovebrings together an exuberant combination of personal insight, deeply researched history, colorful reporting, and vivid description to create a visceral evocation of 49 specific sites in San Francisco. Each site is described in its own chapter, beginning with a with a small map illustrating the exact location. This unique approach captures the exhilarating experience of walking through San Francisco's sublime terrain, while at the same time tying that experience to a history, a mythology, and a physical terrain as rollicking and eccentric as the city herself. From her absurd beginnings as the most distant and moth-eaten outpost of the world's most extensive empire, to her psychotically instantaneous origins in the global epidemic of greed known as the Gold Rush, from her apocalyptic destruction by earthquake and fire to her perennial embrace of rebels, dreamers, hedonists and misfits of all stripes, San Francisco has always followed a trajectory as wildly independent as the untrammeled natural forces that created her. This stunningly eclectic book draws on everything from on-the-ground reporting to obscure academic papers to the author's experience of San Francisco to create an extraordinarily rich and lyrical portrait of a magical corner of the world. Cool Grey City of Lovewill sit comfortably on the short shelf of enduring books about places, alongside E. B. White's Here is New York, Jose Saramago's Journey to Portugal, or Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City.

Gary Kamiya was born in Oakland in 1953 and grew up in Berkeley. After dropping out of Yale, he earned his BA and MA in English lit from UC Berkeley, where he won the Mark Schorer Citation. He drove a taxi in San Francisco for 7 years while completing college and working as a freelance writer. After co-founding a short-lived city magazine called Frisko, he got his first real job at the age of 37 as an editor of the San Francisco Examiner's Sunday magazine, Image. After five years at the Examiner, where he was a culture critic and book editor, he left to co-found the groundbreaking Web site Salon.com, where he was executive editor for 12 years. He is currently a columnist for Salon. His first book, Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler, was a critically-acclaimed history. He is married to the novelist Kate Moses. They have two children.