“Betcha I can show ya / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Betchadollar, / Betchadollar, / Where ya / Got them shoooes. / Got your sneakers on your foot, / Got your feet on the street, / And the street’s in Noo / Awlins, Loo- / Eez-ee-anna. Where I, for my component, first ate a live oyster and first saw a naked girl with the lighting on . . Each and every time I head to New Orleans I am startled by something.”

So writes Roy Blount Jr. with this exuberant, character-filled saunter through a place he has treasured almost about Feet on the Street:: Rambles Around New Orleans his whole life-a town “like no various other place in the us, and yet (or consequently) the cradle of American lifestyle.” Here we experience everything through his eye, ears, and taste buds: the structures, music, romance (yes, sex as well), historical characters, and everything that glorious food.

The book is split into eight Rambles through different parts of the town. Each closes with lagniappe-a tiny bit extra, a special treat for the audience: here a brief riff on Gennifer Flowers, there a meditation on naked dance. Roy Blount understands New Orleans just like the within an oyster shell and is only too glad to consider us to both the famous as well as the infamous sights. He captures all of the great and rich history-culinary, literary, and political-of a town that figured prominently in the lives of Jefferson Davis (who passed away there), Truman Capote (who was conceived there), Zora Neale Hurston (who examined voodoo there), and countless others, including Andrew Jackson, Lee Harvey Oswald, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Jelly Roll Morton, Napoléon, Walt Whitman, O. Henry, Thomas Wolfe, Earl Long, Randy Newman, Edgar Degas, Lillian Hellman, the Boswell Sisters, and the Dixie Cups.

Above all, though, Feet on the Street is a celebration of friendship and joie de vivre in another of America’s greatest and most colorful towns, written by among America’s most beloved humorists.