San Francisco Magazine nominated for two National Magazine Awards

San Francisco Magazine was nominated for two National Magazines awards today, one for general excellence and one for public service.

  It’s a fabulous magazine, and my opinion has nothing to do with the fact that my brother, Steven Dinkelspiel, is president of  the magazine. (Okay, only a little) I send my congratulations to him, to the editor, Bruce Kelley, and to the rest of the staff.

The article that brought San Francisco the nomination for Public Service is one written in December 2009 by Danelle Morton about the Lembi family’s real estate empire, now collapsing. Morton, who ghost wrote Staying True, the memoir of Jenny Sanford, the wife of the disgraced South Carolina governor, spent a year and a half looking into the Lembi’s extensive collection of apartments. The family was one of the city’s largest holders of real estate, with apartment buildings ranging from fancy places on Nob Hill to more pedestrian places in the Mission. It’s an excellent article that details how the availability of cheap money a few years ago permitted the Lembis to buy so much real estate, how they mistreated some of their tenants, and how the crash had brought their empire tumbling down.

San Francisco was nominated in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulation less than 100,000 for its April, August, and December issues.

In 2005, I attended the National Magazine Awards. San Francisco had been nominated then, but unfortunately didn’t win. I have a good feeling for this year.

Bay Area Literary Tidbits

San Francisco magazine has a great oral history showing how the intersection of Bay Area technology and grass roots politicos united to help Obama win.

The “storytellers” include David Talbot, a founder of Salon, Markos Moulitsas Kuniga, founder of Daily Kos, Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org, and many more.

Michelle Richmond, author of No One You Know and The Year of Fog is interviewed at The Rumpus, the new on-line literary magazine conceived by writer Stephen Elliot.

Brenda Webster held a book release party Sunday for The Vienna Triangle, a novel that explores the inner circle of Sigmund Freud. (lots of intrigue and passion, too.) The Chronicle gave it a strong review.

Alan Rinzler reminds authors to be nice to their editors.

Galley Cat interviewed Paul Malmont, whose novel Jack London in Paradise has appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list the last two weeks. He talks about how using Facebook and Twitter helped him draw crowds to his readings.

Speaking of crowds, I hope I draw some when I speak about Towers of Gold tonight (Jan. 27) at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park at 7:30 pm and on Thursday Jan. 29 when I speak at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco at 7 pm. For those of you in the East Bay, I will be speaking at the Stanford Women's Club annual Books on Review around 10 on Thursday. Find more info here.

San Francisco Magazine gives Towers of Gold a Great Review

The editor of San Francisco Magazine, Bruce Kelley, has written a smart review of Towers of Gold:How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California. I think the article captures the spirit of the book. It appears in the November 2008 edition under its "Snap Judgment" section.

Visionary financier Isaias Hellman was the Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan of early California rolled into one. He arrived in LA as a practically penniless, 16-year old German Jew when there were only 300 other Europeans in town. Three decades later, he controlled much of the booming city’s capital, land, and public works – and then he bought Wells Fargo Bank in San Francisco through a merger, earning headlines as the West’s richest man. Hellman starred in so many aspects of the West’s phoenix-like rise between the Civil War and the Depression, that he became our Zelig, only with a really thick portfolio. The banker’s bonds with the financial elite – fellow Jews like Meyer Lehman (his brother-in-law), gentiles like Collis Huntington -- made skittish depositors in both cities less prone to panic. Still, this giant figure had been lost to history until local journalist Frances Dinkelspiel, Hellman’s great-great granddaughter (and the sister of this magazine’s president), stumbled upon his papers at the California Historical Society. Eureka! Many underappreciated developments in California’s astonishing adolescence—the emergence of SoCal, the UC system, post-1906 San Francisco, Hiram Johnson, Lake Tahoe, Southern Pacific Railroad, Hetch Hetchy, U.S. Zionism, you name it -- are recovered here in elegantly restrained prose.

Bruce Kelley
San Francisco Magazine
November 2008

Eco-Anxiety

Leslie Crawford, a friend and member of my writing group North 24^th, wrote a wonderful piece this month for San Francisco Magazine all about the anxieties caused by global warming. We know its coming (or is here, if you haven’t stuck your head in the sand like George W. Bush). We try to do our part by changing to compact fluorescent light bulbs and walking whenever possible, but the depressing reality is that our environment is disintegrating at a rapid rate. Some people are so frightened and paralyzed by this that they seek out the attention of therapists.

Well, it was a great story, which was to be expected as Leslie is a wonderful and insightful writer. San Francisco Magazine is big and glossy and chock full of fashion ads but it also offers cutting edge journalism. Its editor Bruce Kelley always manages to put out a magazine that I actually want to read, rather than flip through. And did I mention that my brother, Steven Dinkelspiel, is the president of the magazine?

All of this is a long way of saying that the New York Times ran a front page story on Saturday about eco-Moms, women who get together to try and use environmentally safe products in their homes. Mentioned prominently in Patricia Leigh Brown's piece was Leslie’s article from San Francisco Magazine. There was even a sidebar on eco-anxiety. And by 9 am California time, the story was the second-most emailed story from the Times.

This is just one more example of how California is on the leading edge of social and political movements. Not only are we organizing to fight global warming, we are in the forefront of a self-help movement to assist us in the long battle.

By the way, Leslie and her son Sam are the authors of City Walks with Kids: San Francisco, a boxed deck of 50 cards that map entertaining walks parents can do with their kids (Chronicle Books 2007).