Synopses & Reviews
Reporting from the front lines of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg sound a warning bell to all urban residents. Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.
Review
Passionate, potent, and to the point, Solnit's polemic embodies American political and social writing at its best.One day, we all woke up and San Francisco had become a bohemian entertainment park, without bohemians. Those were the golden days of virtual capitalism. Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg help us to understand why this happened. Their book is necessary to understanding our new place in a brand new scary world. -- Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Synopsis
Writer-historian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg survey San Francisco's transformation -- skyrocketing rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the poor; the homogenization of the city's architecture, industries and population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its sites of civic memory.
About the Author
Rebecca Solnit is author of, among other books,
Wanderlust, A Book of Migrations, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC award-winning
River of Shadows and
A Paradise Built In Hell. A contributing editor to Harper’s, she writes regularly for the
London Review of Books and the
Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.
Urban archaeologist and artist Susan Schwartzenberg is the author of Market Street, a visual study of San Francisco’s main artery, as well as photo-essays in several books, including Reclaiming San Francisco.