The best of Herb Caen, 1960-1975

Description

Semi interesting book by semi interesting author with occasionally interesting insight. I was hoping for a book that immersed you in the people & characters and lifestyles of San Francisco in the 60s and 70s and got, not that. I once read a critic call Joan Didion’s style of writing and observation “precious.” Caen is 100000x more. Half of his writing is distracting clever wordplay (I get it he’s a columnist) & on that note his voice got annoying af quick because it’s like. You not cute just because you’re like a old jaded cynic who occasionally lifts the veil to REVEAL —? an empathetic human heart. Especially bc his empathies are often directed at the wrong characters lol. Substantively the most interesting parts were his impressions of different cross streets at that moment in time. & how much is the same, or different. We all still hate navigating Market. I wonder if he would be happy that the trolleys are still in fact running, albeit almost exclusively for tourists I can’t tell what perspective he was writing from. Somebody who disdains nostalgia but is always always always looking for a San Francisco of yesteryear and is so absorbed in this that the San Francisco of 1968 basically passes him by. And as a reader I’m like wait wait it’s over? What happened? What did you see? And it may be that he saw nothing worth recording.

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