Currently reading a 2016 collection of essays mostly from ordinary people who live or lived in Buffalo, my boyhood home. Cannot recommend it as great literature because these are primarily amateur writers, and as the intro states, "it's for those who've moved away but still feel nostalgic . . ." Yet, one reminiscence from one essay directly mirrors an unusual experience of mine here in San Jose and illustrates the unheralded greatness of the two cities. A retired English professor living in Philadelphia since 1965 wrote, "Two incidents epitomize my experience of Buffalo. . . . [1] When I was still in grade school [likely in the early 1940s], I was riding the Parkside bus on the way home to North Park one dark winter evening about 8:30. There were high snow banks on either side of Main Street, which was eerily empty of traffic. The bus itself carried no more than eight passengers. A little less than a minute after one street corner stop, the driver braked in front of Paul's Pies . . . He announced that he was going in to buy us one dozen jelly doughnuts and one dozen peanut sticks. . . . So there we all sat, the dreariness of a routine NFT [Niagara Frontier Transit] bus ride suddenly interrupted by fresh doughnuts for the remainder of the ride." I've lived in San Jose since 1994. In the first couple years after I moved here, I took the since discontinued 82 bus downtown from my nearby Northside neighborhood. As a reflection of San Jose's suburban sensibility, downtown was not the line's terminus but only another set of stops along the way to Westgate shopping center. I was usually the only passenger in a suit, and most riders were elderly women, probably headed to the end of the line. Our driver would regularly make an unauthorized stop at Casa Vicky's Mexican bakery and restaurant at 17th & Julian, drop in and buy a bag of warm tortillas, which he passed around gratis to the grateful passengers, including me. So, there I sat, the dreariness of a morning ride to the office suddenly interrupted by warm tortillas for its remainder. As Rancid notes, this ain't New York and it blessedly ain't LA. A book about Buffalo unexpectedly reminded me you can really breathe in San Jose.
The recent unveiling of the memorial to lynching victims in Alabama reminded me of this great book, Lynching in the West, which dispels the notion that extra-judicial hangings were limited to African-Americans in the South. California had an ugly history with lynching, as well, including many Mexican-Americans. https://www.dukeupress.edu/Lynching-in-the-West/
And speaking of books about lynching, Swift Justice is an absolutely fantastic book about a lynching in San Jose.