What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit's
brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out
the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one
place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists,
writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps,
each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as
experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a
tour that will forever change the way we think about place.
She explores the area thematically--connecting, for example,
Eadweard Muybridge's foundation of motion-picture technology
with Alfred Hitchcock's filming of Vertigo. Across an urban
grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly
unlimited landmarks and treasures--butterfly habitats, queer
sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen
Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both
progressive and conservative, and details the cultural
geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the
Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by
redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original,
this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the
layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us--or to
discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse,
or Shanghai.
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