Richard A. Walker, a retired UC Berkeley geography professor and author of”Pictures of a Gone City.” The geographer Richard Walker is out with an unflinching examination of the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicenter of the tech boom – and he opens the book with a poem published more than a half-century before the iPhone: “The world is a beautiful place / to be born into / if you don't mind happiness / not always being / so very much fun / if you don't mind a touch of hell / now and then / just when everything is fine / because even in heaven / they don't sing / all the time,” it begins.
