My nomination for a perfect, crystalline Saturday: Follow Drescher's guide through San Francisco neighborhoods to find murals on walls glowing against the September sky. The title is right. Humankind doesn't let nature alone in Bagdad by the Bay. We have been filling walls with our color and figures since the walls have stood in the City. That most curious of monuments, Coit Tower, brimming with the muscular WPA murals, tells California's story in paint. The murals in the Haight vibrate with psychedelic counterculture; those of the Mission and Western Addition not only deliver the messages of the Latino and African American neighborhoods but have become identified as centers of the communities. People meet at a mural in San Francisco, just as they might meet at a fountain in Rome. Of course, the book records the outstanding art across the Bay and down the Peninsula, but for me the best part of the book was its putting together city maps and pictures of murals so that a reader can experience the favorites. The fancy semiotics, art techniques and materials are all here, conveyed by a recognized authority, but the author is wise enough not to get in the way of the always revolutionary, ever traditional mix of color, lines, architecture and geography. A keeper.

Tim Brown has a well controlled voice. He resisted writing about silly college pranks. Instead, he has written a story about people who live on the margin of university life. This is not to say that it is heavy. It is not. It is wry and ironic, cheerful when it needs to be, bittersweet when appropriate. I regret that it is more of a short novel. He obviously has the ability to do a larger story filled with more characters. Tim: don't end the next one as quickly.