Ibrahim Bin Mohammed Bin Mohammed itibaren Mirky, Sums'ka oblast, Ukrayna
Loved it! Although it wasn't as good as Eclipse, it was still great!
I did not like this book at all, despite all the wonderful reviews. I found that when I was about half way through it, I didn't care what happened to any of the characters, so I stopped reading it.
This book was the accompaniment to an 1989 art exhibit about past and present 'visionary' plans to change/improve San Francisco (both successful and failed). Everything from a pre-1906 earthquake plan to carve immense new Paris-like diagonal avenues across the entire city and vastly expand the parks (over neighborhoods where there were already homes!) to the successful visionary project of the bridges (completed during the depression, of all things, which I didn't know before) to ambitious modern plans. There's the expected historical essays which are pretty interesting, but even more intriguing is the inclusion of two personal essays by Richard Rodriguez and Mark Helpin, both of which are excellent, and two short works of fiction, including 'Skinner's Room' by William Gibson, which envisions a future San Francisco where the homeless population have constructed a makeshift city around the structure of the closed and abandoned Golden Gate bridge. Great illustrations, especially of the century old plans, abound.
Once I warmed up to the protagonist, this story really took off.