Pogo Press

This is a new collection of columns from legendary newspaperman Gareth Hiebert. For 32 years Hiebert has written a regular column for the St. Paul Dispatch, then for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Using the pen name of Oliver Towne, he covered St. Paul's past and present, celebrating people and neighborhoods. Some of his best-known columns about the community appeared in City on Seven Hills, now out of print. This new collection also includes St. Paul stories, but focuses more on Minnesota and beyond. In fact, Hiebert's columns on his foreign travels constitute much of the book. Its subjects include: meeting Salvador Dali; interviewing Julia Child; dining with Paul Bocuse; visiting with French villagers who risked their lives to aid Jewish refugees; traveling to the island of Iona in the Hebrides, where Macbeth is buried.

It's a book you should run out and buy, for Gary Hiebert is to St. Paul what Mike Royko was to Chicago, Herb Caen to San Francisco. Even if you don't, you have to like Hiebert because of his humanity, which he wore right out there on his sleeve, unlike so many of the cynical journalists of the in-your-face variety -- Dave Wood, Book Report