Friday, February 06, 2009
 
Book Report: St. Louis 365 by Joe Sonderman (2002)
First of all, let's log the defect. The book is called St. Louis 365, but it includes February 29, so it should be St. Louis 366.

That said, it take each day of the year and relates a set of things that happened on it in St. Louis history. Sonderman and his assistants scoured newspaper archives, apparently, to come up with this list. It includes a lot of one-off tidbits that give you neat little origins for street names and whatnot throughout the city and county, but also provide some narrative in identifying events in a series for larger stories, such as the Greenlease kidnapping and the World's Fair in 1904.

It took me a while to get through it, since it's not a book that drags you along. It is, however, a good book for stop and start, pick it up for a couple minutes in a doctor's waiting room, sort of reading. I started reading it last year when I was going through browseable books during ballgames and only finished it in January.

But a good idea book and something that will give me odd bits of trivia to throw out randomly in conversations where the trivia don't exactly fit and will meet a sort of stunned silence as people puzzle out the irrelevance. But that's why I read.

Books mentioned in this review:


- posted by Brian J. @ 8:07 AM
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