Friends of the SFPL
  • About Us
    • 60+ Years of Friends
    • Board
    • Staff
    • Our Supporters
    • Financials
    • Blog >
      • History Series
    • Contact Us >
      • Employment
    • Sign-Up for Newsletter
  • Support Us
    • Donate
    • Leadership Circle
    • Innovation Circle
    • Leave a Legacy Gift
    • The Pacifics
    • Gift of appreciated stock
    • Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD)
    • Other ways to give
    • Library Preservation Fund
  • What We Fund
  • Buy & Donate Books
    • Bookstore
    • Donate Books
    • This Is Ear Hustle
  • Laureates 2023
  • Events
    • Book Sales
  • Residencies
    • Brown Handler Writer's Residency ​
    • James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Fellowship
  • Volunteer
  • About Us
    • 60+ Years of Friends
    • Board
    • Staff
    • Our Supporters
    • Financials
    • Blog >
      • History Series
    • Contact Us >
      • Employment
    • Sign-Up for Newsletter
  • Support Us
    • Donate
    • Leadership Circle
    • Innovation Circle
    • Leave a Legacy Gift
    • The Pacifics
    • Gift of appreciated stock
    • Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD)
    • Other ways to give
    • Library Preservation Fund
  • What We Fund
  • Buy & Donate Books
    • Bookstore
    • Donate Books
    • This Is Ear Hustle
  • Laureates 2023
  • Events
    • Book Sales
  • Residencies
    • Brown Handler Writer's Residency ​
    • James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Fellowship
  • Volunteer
Friends of Friends Collection 

Here's a collection that showcases amazing current and former board members who are also accomplished authors.  

Steeped in Heritage

$26.95

By Sarah Ives


Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea ( New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century )


South African rooibos tea is a commodity of contrasts. Renowned for its healing properties, the rooibos plant grows in a region defined by the violence of poverty, dispossession, and racism. And while rooibos is hailed as an ecologically indigenous commodity, it is farmed by people who struggle to express “authentic” belonging to the land: Afrikaners, who espouse a “white” African indigeneity, and “coloureds,” who are characterized either as the mixed-race progeny of “extinct” Bushmen or as possessing a false identity, indigenous to nowhere.


In Steeped in Heritage Sarah Ives explores how these groups advance alternate claims of indigeneity based on the cultural ownership of an indigenous plant. This heritage-based struggle over rooibos shows how communities negotiate landscapes marked by racial dispossession within an ecosystem imperiled by climate change and precarious social relations in the postapartheid era.

Shop

The San Francisco Civic Center

$34.95

By James W. Haas



The San Francisco Civic Center: A History of the Design, Controversies, and Realization of a City Beautiful Masterpiece


San Francisco is known and loved around the world for its iconic man-made structures, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, cable cars, and Transamerica Pyramid. Yet its Civic Center, with the grandest collection of monumental municipal buildings in the United States, is often overlooked, drawing less global and local interest, despite its being an urban planning marvel featuring thirteen government office and cultural buildings.


In The San Francisco Civic Center, James Haas tells the complete story of San Francisco’s Civic Center and how it became one of the most complete developments envisioned by any American city. Originally planned and designed by John Galen Howard in 1912, the San Francisco Civic Center is considered in both design and materials one of the finest achievements of the American reformist City Beautiful movement, an urban design movement that began more than a century ago.


Haas meticulously unravels the Civic Center’s story of perseverance and dysfunction, providing an understanding and appreciation of this local and national treasure. He discusses why the Civic Center was built, how it became central to the urban planning initiatives of San Francisco in the early twentieth century, and how the site held onto its founders’ vision despite heated public debates about its function and achievement. He also delves into the vision for the future and related national trends in city planning and the architectural and art movements that influenced those trends.


Riddled with inspiration and leadership as well as controversy, The San Francisco Civic Center, much like the complex itself, is a stunning manifestation of the confident spirit of one of America’s most dynamic and creative cities.

Shop

The  Armageddon  of  Funk

Picture
By Michael Warr 
Shop
Picture

Of  Poetry  and  Protest

By Michael Warr 
Shop

​ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICES &
Donation center Location
1630 17TH STREET
SAN FRANCISCO, CA 94107

​Administrative Phone: (415) 626-7500
BOOK DONATION CENTER: (415) 522-8606 

Get INvolved 

DONATE/JOIN/RENEW

Contact Us


​Tax ID Number:
 94-6085452 
©2021 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library
SUBSCRIBE TODAY FOR UPDATES!


Please leave this field empty