Synopses & Reviews
"At last a field book with the sense of San Franciscoand#151;the non sense, the real sense, the mysteries of the microclimates, gays and butterflies, gangs, boulevards and mysterious alleys. All here!"and#151;Michael McClure
"Downright near infinite, at any rate, the good fortune of a city blessed with such antic chroniclers as Rebecca Solnit, First Citizen of the Imagination, and her entire splendid crew. There's one map missing, though, from this marvelous little volume: the MRI of any reader lucky enough to wander into its myriad graven precinctsand#151;synapses firing, dendrites scintillating away, a whole mad happy carnival of fresh neuronal associations."and#151;Lawrence Weschler, author of Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences
"Solnit's writing is born of intense reverie and deep reading, passionate inquiry and political defiance; she is a lyric questor for the texture of everyday life, and she attends to places and to their variety and particularity with an exhilarating form of attention that illuminates and transforms her subjects. Infinite City is a marvellous atlas, a new approach to history-making and storytelling; it's also a highly original praise song to many San Franciscos, a multi-layered and polyphonic testament, alert to the play of detail and to the grand design, to the shadows of memory that fall, the restless shifts in the urban scene and the vital energy of overlooked subjectivities."and#151;Marina Warner
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and#8220;A joyous book.and#8221;
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and#8220;Inventive and affectionate.and#8221;
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and#8220;This nicely designed book offers a collection of essays and subject specific maps anyone who loves San Francisco will enjoy poring over.and#8221;
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and#8220;Brilliantly disorients our native sense of place.and#8221;
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and#8220;This is an amazing and thought-provoking book.and#8221;
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and#8220;A richly textured graphic book that no electronic format can master yet, Infinite City features Rebecca Solnit as cultural and historical tour guide through the city she calls home.and#8221;
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and#8220;A fresh and intriguing spin on mapmaking.and#8221;
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and#8220;A thrilling new book.and#8221;
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and#8220;A gorgeously produced collection of maps and essays.and#8221;
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and#8220;Breathtakingly original.and#8221;
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and#8220;A treasure of intricate, intimate maps.and#8221;
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"Rebecca Snedeker and Rebecca Solnit's Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas is a book about New Orleans, but it's also a book about the kind of shared experiences and tensions that could exist in almost any city. Twenty-two maps illustrate ancient and recent histories of the Crescent City, with local tabs that inspire hums of pride. . . . Though many of those labels are specific to New Orleans, the themes they highlight exist other places, making the book not only a local's guide to the city, but also an anthropologist's guide to the idea of metropolis."
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"Unique maps and eclectic essays pair to create a thought-provoking portrait of a singular city."
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"An elegant and fascinating volume of maps, essays and artwork. . . . The result is intelligent, often beautiful prose and compelling maps in an exciting exploration of the idiosyncratic details, gestures and rituals that determine how people inhabit, love and perceive this elusive and entrancing city."
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"'Unfathomable City's' secret weapon is its imaginative cartography. . . . Each chart, like a plate in a restaurant, has ingredients and flavors that take the reader deep into the city's history. If you think you know these streets, this atlas will make you want to walk them again."
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"A deeply illuminating assemblage of maps and essays."
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"A vivid portrait of one of America's most culturally rich cities. More than an atlas or a travel guide, the book provides a compendium of perspectives and histories, comprised of 22 short essays and numerous colorful and beautifully illustrated companion maps. . . . A captivating read for tourists, Louisiana residents, and just about anyone looking to gain familiarity with United States history, folklore, and myth-culture."and#160; STARRED REVIEW
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"Unfathomable City is no standard atlas. . . . With beautiful maps and challenging essays, Unfathomable City presents New Orleans as infinitely complex and ultimately unknowable. The result is not a comprehensive guide, but an invitation."and#160; STARRED REVIEW
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"New Orleans natives tell the same story in boardrooms and bus stops: Their city is a puzzle wrapped in a tease, a mystery scented by sweet olive and garbage, veiled by humidity, echoing with brass bands and the occasional gunshot. Thatand#8217;s the mystery probed on each page of 'Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas,' the grand, map-laden anthology assembled by local filmmaker Rebecca Snedeker and the celebrated essayist and thinker Rebecca Solnit."
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"The maps are playful, colorful and aliveand#8212;in contrast to the utility we're used to with online mapping sites and apps. They're a joy to study; New Orleanians will no doubt pore over the map depicting the ongoing revival of once moribund St. Claude Avenue and the parade routes of the city's archaic but surviving social-aid and pleasure clubs. Tourists familiarizing themselves with the city may spend more time on the "Repercussions" map, tracing jazz history and club locations, or Billy Sothern's "sites of contemplation and delight," featuring sculpture gardens, synagogues and Meyer the Hatter. . . . Ms. Solnit and Ms. Snedeker prove that atlases can still fire the imagination and incite wonder."
Review
"Packed with colorful maps and essays by star writers, this atlas-with-attitude 'encompasses second-line parades, the banana trade, bounce music, the revival along the St. Claude Avenue corridor, and conversations with such iconic musicians as George Porter Jr. and Donald Harrison Jr.'and#8221; TOP 10 BOOKS OF 2013 FOR NEW ORLEANS READERS
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"A brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas. . . . Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place."
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"With and#8220;Unfathomable City,and#8221; Solnit and Snedeker have produced an idiosyncratic, luminous tribute to the greatest human creation defined by its audience participants: the city itself."
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"The New Orleans the book charts is unfathomable 'because no two people live in quite the same city.' The twenty-two vignettes in this collection speak to that individual appreciation in twenty-three distinct voices, yet whatever the topicand#8212;apothecaries, lead poisoning, lemon ice, institutional abominations, sugar, bounce music, environmental calamities, shifts in the road, bananasand#8212;they burn bright, both breaking and gladdening your heart; and the handsome cartography is illuminating in the best tradition of maps: taking you there, for better or worse. . . . New Orleans may be porous as a spongeand#8212;in many ways, from its acceptance of refugees to water-charged soil typesand#8212;but the writing here has a high specific gravity, a chewiness that makes you want to pay close attention and count your bites."
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"A fascinating look at New Orleans. Through 22 maps varying in their strange detail and beauty, each accompanied by an essay, Solnit and Snedeker put together a deep portrait of the city and so much of what makes it unique."
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"Importantly, the book never fetishizes New Orleans. By addressing both the vibrant culture of public celebration (the second lines and the krewe parades and the near-constant festivals) and New Orleansand#8217;s bleaker side (environmental exploitation, the opportunism of the banana industry, the failures of post-Katrina authority), Solnit and Snedeker present an honest portrait. They delve deep into the cityand#8217;s history, as far back as pre-European colonization, and resurface in the present, with bounce music and housing projects. Moreover, unlike many recent New Orleans books, they donand#8217;t overly dwell on Katrina to milk sympathy or a morbid interest from their readers. In short, Unfathomable City is beautifully balanced."
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"A treasure trove of rich reminiscences that will be appreciated by the native, and appeal to past and future tourists."
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"The effect of Unfathomable City and the series of which it is a part is that of a healthy and bracing critiqueand#8212;one that we urgently need in this time of ubiquitous geographic information. It is a critique we should hope will extend to other American places as this lovely series continues."
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"A beautifully creative and colorful atlas of New Orleans . . . a rich visual and literary banquet, serving up a kaleidoscopic array of perspectives on the city's multifarious peoples and their struggles and victories."
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"Beautiful cartography and from-the-street, intimate essays by lives lived in this city. My wanderlust was sated."
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"New Orleans is suffused with history, with mystery, with violence, and with sublime beauty. From shrimp po-boys to extravagant Mardi Gras floats, from the enormous live oaks lining St. Charles Avenue like silent, ancient sentries to second-line parades with loud brass bands weaving their way over pothole-laden streets, New Orleans leaves an impression. Trying to understand and make sense of all the facets of the place, and all the attendant contradictions, is a task with seemingly no end. The beautiful Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas can help with this, and Iand#8217;d highly recommend it to anyone the least bit infatuated with the Crescent City. Part coffee table book, part history and culture guide, Unfathomable City is, like New Orleans herself, unique. Filled with twenty-two gorgeously illustrated and colored maps of the city, each spread across two pages, itand#8217;s an atlas that aims to both educate and challenge."
Synopsis
Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts--from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists--amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan's playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City's unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past. Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York's buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more.
Contributors: Sheerly Avni, Gaiutra Bahadur, Marshall Berman, Joe Boyd, Will Butler, Garnette Cadogan, Thomas J. Campanella, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Teju Cole, Joel Dinerstein, Paul La Farge, Francisco Goldman, Margo Jefferson, Lucy R. Lippard, Barry Lopez, Valeria Luiselli, Suketu Mehta, Emily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Luc Sante, Heather Smith, Jonathan Tarleton, Astra Taylor, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Christina Zanfagna
Interviews with: Valerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Melle Mel, RZA
Synopsis
"The maps themselves are things of beauty... a document of its time, of our time."
--Sadie Stein, New York Times "One is invited to fathom the many New Yorks hidden from history's eye... thoroughly terrific."
--Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts--from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists--amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan's playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City's unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past. Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York's buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more.
Contributors: Sheerly Avni, Gaiutra Bahadur, Marshall Berman, Joe Boyd, Will Butler, Garnette Cadogan, Thomas J. Campanella, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Teju Cole, Joel Dinerstein, Paul La Farge, Francisco Goldman, Margo Jefferson, Lucy R. Lippard, Barry Lopez, Valeria Luiselli, Suketu Mehta, Emily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Luc Sante, Heather Smith, Jonathan Tarleton, Astra Taylor, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Christina Zanfagna
Interviews with: Valerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Melle Mel, RZA
Synopsis
Winner of the 2017 Brendan Gill Prize from the Municipal Arts Society of New York
"The maps themselves are things of beauty... a document of its time, of our time."
--Sadie Stein, New York Times
"One is invited to fathom the many New Yorks hidden from history's eye... thoroughly terrific."
--Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Nonstop Metropolis, the culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts--from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists--amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through Manhattan's playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City's unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past. Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York's buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more.
Contributors: Sheerly Avni, Gaiutra Bahadur, Marshall Berman, Joe Boyd, Will Butler, Garnette Cadogan, Thomas J. Campanella, Daniel Aldana Cohen, Teju Cole, Joel Dinerstein, Paul La Farge, Francisco Goldman, Margo Jefferson, Lucy R. Lippard, Barry Lopez, Valeria Luiselli, Suketu Mehta, Emily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Luc Sante, Heather Smith, Jonathan Tarleton, Astra Taylor, Alexandra T. Vazquez, Christina Zanfagna
Interviews with: Valerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz, Grand Wizzard Theodore, Melle Mel, RZA
Synopsis
What makes a place?
Infinite City, Rebecca Solnitand#8217;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 thematicallyand#151;connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridgeand#8217;s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcockand#8217;s filming of
Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasuresand#151;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 usand#151;or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai.
Synopsis
Like the bestselling
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, this book is a brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, one that provides a vivid, complex look at the multi-faceted nature of New Orleans, a city replete with contradictions. More than twenty essays assemble a chorus of vibrant voices, including geographers, scholars of sugar and bananas, the city's remarkable musicians, prison activists, environmentalists, Arab and Native voices, and local experts, as well as the coauthorsand#8217; compelling contributions. Featuring 22 full-color two-page-spread maps,
Unfathomable City plumbs the depths of this major tourist destination, pivotal scene of American history and culture and, most recently, site of monumental disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.
The innovative mapsand#8217; precision and specificity shift our notions of the Mississippi, the Caribbean, Mardi Gras, jazz, soils and trees, generational roots, and many other subjects, and expand our ideas of how any city is imagined and experienced. Together with the inspired texts, they show New Orleans as both an imperiled cityand#151;by erosion, crime, corruption, and sea level riseand#151;and an ageless city that lives in music as a form of cultural resistance. Compact, lively, and completely original, Unfathomable City takes readers on a tour that will forever change the way they think about place.
Synopsis
"This series of atlases is one of my absolute favorites. Vivid, beautiful, and deceptively meaningful,
Unfathomable City successfully pushes cartographic conventions. It explores what it means to know a place, not just the street grid. A delight to behold, this is an incredible achievement rarely seen in modern cartography." and#151;William McNulty, cartographer, former director of maps at National Geographic, former graphics editor,
New York Times
"This bright, rolling river of a book carries a chorus of mapmakers, writers, andand#160;artists singing of deep memory in New Orleans. Unfathomable City is a book to cherishand#151;and sure to be a classic." and#151;Jason Berry, New Orleansand#150;based journalist and coauthor ofand#160;Up from the Cradle of Jazz:and#160;New Orleans Music since World War II
"Race, space, and place: this atlas is a peopleand#8217;s ecology of persistent resistance, an open-ended historical geography guiding toward an indomitable futureand#151;a permanent revolution no less likely than the city itself. Read this book!" and#151;Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, CUNY Graduate Center
About the Author
Rebecca Solnit is the author of many books, including Savage Dreams, Storming the Gates of Paradise, and Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, all from UC Press. Rebecca Snedeker is an Emmy Awardand#150;winning independent filmmaker and native New Orleanian.
Table of Contents
Introduction: On the Inexhaustibility of a City
Map 1. The Names before the Names: The Indigenous Bay Area, 1769
and#147;A Map the Size of the Land,and#8221; by Lisa Conrad
Map 2. Green Women: The Open Spaces and Some Who Saved Them
and#147;Great Women and Green Spaces,and#8221; by Richard Walker
Map 3. Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo
and#147;The Eyes of the Gods,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 4. Right Wing of the Dove: The Bay Area as Conservative/Military Brain Trust
and#147;The Sinews of War Are Boundless Money,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 5. Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces
and#147;Full Spectrum,and#8221; by Aaron Shurin
Map 6. Truth to Power: Race and Justice in the Cityand#8217;s Heart
and#147;The Cityand#8217;s Tangled Heart,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 7. Poison/Palate: The Bay Area in Your Body
and#147;What Doesnand#8217;t Kill You Makes You Gourmet,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 8. Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II
and#147;High Tide, Low Ebb,and#8221; by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Map 9. Fillmore: Promenading the Boulevard of Gone
and#147;Little Pieces of Many Wars,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 10. Third Street Phantom Coast: A Map by Alison Pebworth
Map 11. Graveyard Shift: The Lost Industrial City of 1960 and the Remnant 6 AM Bars
The Smell of Ten Thousand Gallons of Mayonnaise and a Hundred Tons of Coffee, by Chris Carlsson
Map 12. The Lost World: South of Market, 1960, before Redevelopment
Piled Up, Scraped Away,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 13. The Mission: North of Home, South of Safe
and#147;The Geography of the Unseen,and#8221; by Adriana Camarena
Map 14. Tribes of San Francisco: Their Comings and Goings
and#147;Who Washed Up on These Shores and Who the Tides Took Away,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 15. Who Am I Where? and#191;Quiand#233;n soy dand#243;nde?: A Map of Contingent Identities
and#147;Who Am I Where? and#191;Quiand#233;n soy dand#243;nde?and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit and Guillermo Gand#243;mez-Peand#241;a
Map 16. Death and Beauty: A Year of Murders, a Noble Species of Tree
and#147;Red Sinking, Green Soaring,and#8221; by Summer Brenner
Map 17. Four Hundred Years and Five Hundred Evictions in the City
and#147;Dwellers and Drifters in the Shaky City,and#8221; by Heather Smith
Map 18. The World in a Cup: Coffee Economies and Ecologies
and#147;How to Get to Ethiopia from Ocean Beach,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 19. Phrenological San Francisco
and#147;City of Fourteen Bumps,and#8221; by Paul La Farge
Map 20. Dharma Wheels and Fish Ladders: Salmon Migrations, Soto Zen Arrivals
and#147;A Way Home,and#8221; by Genine Lentine
Map 21. Treasure Map: The Forty-Nine Jewels of San Francisco
and#147;From the Giant Camera Obscura to the Bayview Opera House,and#8221; by Rebecca Solnit
Map 22. Once and Future Waters:Nineteenth-Century Bodies of Water, Twenty-Second-Century Shorelines
Acknowledgments
Contributors