Beyond the ‘Dark Fog of Disdain,’ San Francisco Is Still There
How Revisiting a Children’s Book Helped Me See the City by the Bay, On and Off the Page
For a young bookworm like me in 1960s New Jersey, almost nothing was more exciting in elementary school than ordering my own paperbacks from the Scholastic Book catalog. I would carefully select books from a paper form distributed in class. A few weeks later, paperbacks arrived at school in wondrous boxes. Best of all, they usually had nothing to do with schoolwork. I read them in bed or in a park, on winter nights or summer days.
Those novels took me places, out of my crowded, insular hometown. My family often …
