Fascinating info. This is a fun book to read and view.

I know San Francisco very well, know Seattle fairly well, barely know Portland, but I’m interested in all three cities and in their similarities & differences and how they relate with one another in various ways. This is a book that aims to show & tell these sorts of statistics.

I actually enjoyed the historical information the best. The current information will of course frequently change. If not for some of the information becoming obsolete this is a book I’d like to own. There are sections that are already obsolete or at least dated such as the covid sub-section.

There weren’t that many but the typos/incorrect information drove me crazy, such as specifying (just in one particular place, not in other places in the book) that the Richmond and Sunset Districts are in the eastern vs. western part of San Francisco. Stern Grove is not in Golden Gate Park, etc. though that latter one might be my eyes. On several pages I had to pull out a magnifying glass and a couple times even it was not sufficiently helpful.

I love maps in books and this book has tons of them, and all kinds of them. There are also lots of other graphics, though the book is text heavy.

It’s divided up into sections. The Contents are: Introduction: Upper Left, Urban Landscapes, Nature and the City, Social Relations, Commerce, Popular Culture. Each of these sections has many sub-sections.

4-1/2 stars, a half star off because in the not too distant future this will function only as a history book. There is already a lot of history in it and much of the “current” content is already history or at least not new. ( )