Books About San Francisco
Post-WWII to the 21st Century
The books listed below are about San Francisco from WWII to the present.
Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times. Willie Brown, New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Brown's autobiography from his arrival in SF in 1951 from Texas is a candid and fascinating how-to-succeed-in-politics, crammed with down-to-earth reality tips not common in civics texts (with advice on how to dress & work a party). (Google this book)
Brothers in Pen: Tragedy, Struggle and Hope. San Quentin Nine (Foreword by Tobias Wolff. ) North Block Press, 2008.
This is an anthology of short stories (fiction, some memoir/creative non-fiction, and some a combination) written in an ongoing writing workshop at San Quentin State Prison, San Quentin, California. (Google this book)
City For Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco. Chester W. Hartman, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Politics and urban development - Centering his account on the downtown Yerba Buena Center Project, Hartman illuminates the conflicts of interest, ambitions, misrepresentations, extravagant promises, brutality, waste, incompetence in the name of “urban renewal”. (Google this book)
The Contested City. John H. Mollenkopf, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Using Boston and San Francisco as case studies, the author shows how urban development programs influenced and were influenced by big-city politics. (Google this book)
Ethnicity and Entrepreneurship: The New Chinese Immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bernard Wong, Needham Heights, MA: Allen & Bacon, 1998. This book focuses on how the new Chinese immigrants use their ethnic and personal resources to make economic adaptations in the US. Sociologists and anthropologists. (Google this book)
Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism. Rebecca Solnit & Susan Schwartzenberg, Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2002. The effects of San Francisco’s housing squeeze and accelerated gentrification of low-income neighborhoods created a cultural crisis. (Google this book)
Left Coast City: Progressive Politics in San Francisco, 1975-1991. Richard Edward DeLeon, Laurence, KS: University of Kansas, 1992. Richard DeLeon analyzes the successes and failures of the progressive movement as it topples the business-dominated progrowth regime, imposes stringent controls on growth and development, and achieves political control of city hall. (Google this book)
Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. Victor G. and Brett de Bary Nee, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972. Portrait of San Francisco's Chinatown in the early 1970s -- it’s poverty, unemployment, low-wage garment and restaurant industries, and gangs. (Google this book)
No Hiding Place: Empowerment and Recovery for Our Troubled Communities. Cecil Williams with Rebecca Laird, San Francisco, CA. HarperCollins, 1992. The pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, which is nationally known for the success of its community activism, speaks of the spiritual power that drives the church's innovative recovery programs. (Google this book)
On Doing Time. Morton Sobell, San Francisco, CA: Golden Gate National Parks Association, 2001. This is the story of what led up to, and the conduct of the infamous trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage where Sobell spent 5 of his 18 plus years of prison, in Alcatraz in the middle of San Francisco Bay. (Google this book)
Power in the City: Decision Making in San Francisco. Frederick M. Wirt, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974. 125 year political history of San Francisco providing insights on the politics of large American cities in the 1970s. (Google this book)
The San Franciscans. Niven Busch, New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1962. A novel of never-ending conflict on the battlefields of law and banking, between the dowered rich of San Franciscoand its ambitious poor. (Google this book)
San Francisco’s West of Twin Peaks. Jacqueline Proctor, San Francisco, CA: Arcadia Publishing, 2006. The development of west of Twin Peaks as “suburbs in the city”. (Google this book)
We Are The People Our Parents Warned Us Against: The Classic Account of the 1960s Counter-Culture in San Francisco. Nicholas von Hoffman, Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1989. The colorful history of the rise of the social philosophy and politics ushered in by a proud and defiant youth subculture. (Google this book)
Just the beginning
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