Man, I lament that the St. Louis paper doesn’t have a real metro\/lifestyle columnist, what with Bill McClellan and his “Here’s a bad guy who’s in a bad situation, don’t you feel bad for him” schtick and the black guy. But when it did, I didn’t pay too much attention. Aw, heck, I was just a kid.<\/p>\n
This book collects a hundred or so columns from Viets’s tenure at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/i>, and she covers the South Side of the city with an eye for amusing anecdotes and St. Louisisms. As I’ve now spent more time in St. Louis than my home town, unfortunately, I enjoy these stories way too much.<\/p>\n
So I should go forth and look for more of Viets’s collections or try some of her fiction. I shall.<\/p>\n
Aside, tying in books I’ve read. The cover shot for this book, unavailable from Amazon, was taken at the Coral Courts motel; the first couple of columns talk about its preservation attempt, and Viets wrote about it in the forward to the book Tales from the Coral Court<\/i><\/a>, which I reported about in November 2007.<\/p>\n