This is a prescient book of linked essays, illustrated with photographs by Susan Schwartzenberg. Nearly 20 years ago, long-time San Francisco resident Rebecca Solnit, in her Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, described the coming gentrification, privatization, and homogenization and subsequent hollowing out of a vibrant metropolis. Their book is necessary to understanding our new place in a brand new scary world. Hollow City is a best book club book for discussion, the second novel in the Miss Peregrines Peculiar Children series that blends fantasy with vintage. Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg help us to understand why this happened. Less a straightforward horrorfest than a tasty adventure for any reader with an appetite for thepeculiar. Those were the golden days of virtual capitalism. One day, we all woke up and San Francisco had become a bohemian entertainment park, without bohemians.

Passionate, potent, and to the point, Solnit’s polemic embodies American political and social writing at its best. It is a compelling vision of our emerging global culture of displaced persons. This beautifully composed and crafted book tells their story. It is protected from Molag Bals influence and minions by his. So many of the people who kept American cities alive and creative through dark decades, when capital abandoned the city, have become victims of capital’s recent triumphant return to the city. The Hollow City is an abandoned city found in the depths of Molag Bals realm of Coldharbour. Schwartzenberg’s images survey more than thirty years of upheaval in the name of ‘urban renewal,’ and Solnit’s text brings urgency to the question of whether a place in which artists, activists, and members of diverse races and classes can no longer afford to live is fated to become ‘a city of presentation without creation.’ New Yorker

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