It's hard to imagine cows walking up Third Street or sheep on Innes Avenue, yet a large portion of the area known today as Bayview Hunters Point was once extremely rural. Called Butchertown by locals, the neighborhood was a source of much of San Francisco's food. Over the years, it evolved into an interesting combination of residences, businesses, and industries. The area was home to slaughterhouses, tanneries, tallow works, a saddle shop, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, numerous boat yards including the legendary Allemand Brothers Boat Repair, and the U.S. Naval operations at Hunters Point Shipyard. Alongside these entities lived thousands of residents with unique stories and lifestyles.

Far from the bridges and cable cars, hidden away behind the famous hills, there is another San Francisco Bay Area that most people never see. San Francisco's Hunter's Point and Fillmore District, West Oakland and Richmond's Iron Triangle -- in the 1970s these places on the edges of this great American metropolis offered Barry Shapiro an alternate reality where he pointed his lens. Although Barry made his reputation as a professional photographer with the 1972 publication of Handmade Houses: The Woodbutcher's Art, his day job as a teacher of remedial reading to adults gave him an entree into a world that white America only saw in the blaxploitation films of the day like "Shaft" and "Superfly." His curious eye brought him to many dangerous places, but with the trust he earned, he was able to not only hang out in this unique subculture, but be allowed to photograph their very intimate and sometimes dark moments. In these photos we see glimpses of tenderness that can explode into violence, tension that dissolves into laughter, kids showing off for the camera, and tough motorcycle gangs chilled out after a night of hard partying. What instantly captures the viewer's attention is that Barry, with the force of his energetic personality, established a trusting relationship with each of his subjects, whether that relationship lasted for years or only a few seconds. When Barry wasn't hanging out in these fringe neighborhoods, he was prowling the streets of the Bay Area with his stealth Leica shooting poignant black-and-white moments of street life through the windows of his VW bus. These images record an incredible slice of everyday urban life without any hint of his even being there. Barry captured what Henri Cartier-Bresson called "the decisive moment" over and over with a natural ability that only the best photographers have. Always a maverick, rarely inclined to shoot to spec and unwilling to compromise or cater to photographic fashion, Barry shot his black-and-white photographs with no thoughts of commercialism. Although his career as a photographer spanned more than forty years, and he spent the last sixteen years of his life as a high-school teacher and principal, he never stopped shooting. With a foreword by famed San Francisco rock photographer Jim Marshall and an introduction by best-selling novelist Mark Joseph, two of Barry's closest friends, A Dangerously Curious Eye will show you a very different side of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mike Sullivan loves his adopted city of San Francisco, and he loves trees. In The Trees of San Francisco he has combined his passions, offering a striking and handy compendium of botanical information, historical tidbits, cultivation hints, and more. Sullivan's introduction details the history of trees in the city, a fairly recent phenomenon. The text then piques the reader's interest with discussions of 71 city trees. Each tree is illustrated with a photograph--with its common and scientific names prominently displayed--and its specific location within San Francisco, along with other sites; frequently a close-up shot of the tree is included. Sprinkled throughout are 13 sidelights relating to trees; among the topics are the city's wild parrots and the trees they love; an overview of the objectives of the Friends of the Urban Forest; and discussions about the link between Australia's trees and those in the city, such as the eucalyptus. The second part of the book gets the reader up and about, walking the city to see its trees. Full-page color maps accompany the seven detailed tours, outlining the routes; interesting factoids are interspersed throughout the directions. A two-page color map of San Francisco then highlights 25 selected neighborhoods ideal for viewing trees, leading into a checklist of the neighborhoods and their trees.