Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #201426 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

From Library Journal
This combination history/guidebook is divided into ten chapters, each of which provides background information on San Francisco's historic buildings, museums, and artifacts. Profiles of sites or attractions include hours of operation, costs, and a quick biographical sketch of a key figure. Four walking tours, a brief review of the sites, a chronology of events beginning with 1542, a discussion of San Francisco's Victorian architecture, and a review of the earthquake of 1989 are also included. With more versatile and comprehensive guidebooks to San Francisco available, like Randolph Delehanty's San Francisco: The Ultimate Guide ( LJ 6/1/89) and Richard Wurman's practical San Francisco Access (Access Pr., 1991), this is a discretionary purchase for most libraries.
- Susan Fifer Canby, National Geographic Soc. Lib., Washington,
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
"...a wonderfully concise one-volume history of the city...in a remarkably accessible and enjoyable format." --San Francisco Chronicle

Customer Reviews

Fantastic San Francisco History....
This book is a hybrid between a history book and a guide book. Each chapter historically chronicles a meaningful period of time betweensignificant milestones (i.e. the goldrush of 1849 or the earthquake of 1906). Following each chapter is a guide to monuments, landmarks, and musuems that have items pertaining to the preceding information.

There is a fair amount of illustrations and photographs and the writing style of Rand Richards is very readable. I highly recommend this book to anybody living in or planning to visit the San Francisco bay area.

what the heck happened to the 70s & 80s?
while this is a very concise history of the city, with a lot of material packed into relatively few pages, I find it extremely odd that the author skips from The Summer of Love in the late 1960s all the way to the earthquake of 1989. One has to ask, what informed the author's choice to ignore twenty years of history? Did the murder of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk by Dan White never happen? Did the gay civil rights movement and the development of The Castro neighborhood into the most visible gay community in the world not happen? This seems an irresponsible omission on the part of the author. What a shame.

Extremely good
I really can't recommend this book enough. Mr Richards is a fine writer who breathes life into San Francisco's history using an array of colouful (and often hilarious) anecdotes. I've read a number of other books on the the bay area's history and for sheer enjoyment this stands head-and-shoulders above the rest.