Coinciding with the centennial of San Francisco’s great earthquake and fire, comes a haunting tome almost too heavy for most coffee tables...
By Patrick Burnson
Published: January, 2006
After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing
the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire
University of California Press
$49.45
Coinciding with the centennial of San Francisco’s great earthquake and fire, comes a haunting tome almost too heavy for most coffee tables.
Arizona-based photographer Mark Klett, who has been photographing the American West for over 25 years, began collecting 1906 images from the Legion of Honor’s Genthe archive when the Fine Arts Museums agreed to co-publish this stunning catalogue.
The photographs are more than a reminder of the power of nature or a warning to arrogance in the face of it, says Klett. I also think they are a way to contemplate how we understand time and our relationship to the past.
He directed the Rephotography Survey Project in the late 1970s, which located and re-photographed the sites of images made by William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan, and other photographers surveying the West in the late 19th century.
Bay Crossings readers will recognize many of the waterfront scenes, but Kletts’ fieldwork covers the entire city, from Union Square to the Presidio, South of Market to the Marina Green, and Mission Dolores to Cow Hollow. The results are approximately 75 paired photographs depicting the city then and now, each showing that the two spaces and times are related.
Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
By Claire Harman
HarperCollins Publishers
$29.95
The celebrated author of so many riveting adventure stories satisfied his own most personal quest when taking a ferry across our Bay. It was here, after all, that he met Mrs. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, a cunning and wild woman from Oakland who captured his heart.
Claire Harman has given us a probing psychological profile of a complex and deeply troubled artist who seemed perpetually to be at sea.
Chief among the many ironies here is the fact that RLS came from a family of legendary Scottish engineers who designed and built a string of lighthouses.
Rather than contribute to this legacy, the writer broke from his family by making a canoe voyage along the canals of Belgium and northern France in 1876. An Inland Voyage, a small, lightly-regarded book led to other more distinguished works also closely linked to waterborne journeys.
After completing The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - a homophobic parable, some critics contend - he came through San Francisco again on his way to the South Pacific. Syphilis may have brought on the stroke that killed him at age 44, a point of conjecture this biographer supports.
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey
By Candice Millard
Doubleday $26
Teddy Roosevelt’s health was also put at severe risk on a waterborne journey, explains this widely-published journalist and historian. Undertaken after his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1912, this South American excursion proved to be as nightmarish as any Stevenson tale. Rio da Dúvida (River of Doubt), which runs deep into the Brazilian rain forest, was later renamed Rio Roosevelt to commemorate the adventure. The fact that he and his son survived the trip was reason enough for this honor.
Many readers will recognize Millard as one of National Geographic’s leading contributing editors, and that’s a blessing and curse here. While her nature writing is first rate, the narrative loses steam when the focus shifts to personalities. One comes away, nonetheless, with a new respect for one of America’s most powerful (and imperial) figures.
Flashman on the March
By George MacDonald Fraser
Knopf
$24.00
Imperialistic ferver and manifest destiny in extremis characterize all books in the comic Flashman Papers series, but this one is over the top.
In a story George W. would love, Sir Harry Flashman undertakes a secret intelligence-gathering assignment that pits him against an Abyssinian tyrant, circa 1868.
Flashy, an unreconstructed colonizer and coward, who calls his foes abs and their Egyptian allies gyppos, is hell bent on also leading a war party in its mission to free captive countrymen. Naturally, there’s a beautiful African queen involved in this romp, and plenty of politically incorrect gaiety. Good fun.
