Details
Synopsis
Based on the enormously popular "Prairie Home Companion", Keillor's show on public radio, this collection of stories of modern Midwestern life skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller lists in the mid 1980s, and remained there. In this small Minnesota town, "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." The book won the collective heart of the country, and critics found it impossible to refrain from quoting sizable portions of it in their reviews.
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "The town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, lies on the shore against Adams Hill, looking east across the blue-green water to the dark woods."
Industry Reviews
"'Lake Wobegon Days' is about the way our beliefs, desires, and fears tail off into abstractions--and get renewed from time to time. Mr. Keillor is well quipped to understand this process, since, by his account, he grew up in the fundamentalist religion of the Sanctified Brethren, perfectionists at splitting into infinite subsects over points of doctrine....[This book] is a genuine work of American history."
New York Times Book Review - Veronica Geng (08/25/1985)
"Accounts of sadness and tragedy...are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the book which is always good humored. There are pages of wry smiles and chuckles, and then, when you least expect it, a scene or a single line within a lengthy description that will have you weeping with laughter, unable to keep reading aloud, for surely by now you will be reading the book aloud to anyone within earshot."
Washington Post Book World - Katherine Paterson (09/01/1985)
"...[A] love poem to small towns from that grown-up skinny kid, whose reminiscences are as tender as they are hilarious, complete with a paean to porches."
Christian Science Monitor - Ruth Doan MacDougall (09/06/1986)
"I predict that a minimum of 15 reviews of this book will refer to me as 'a modern day Mark Twain.' Anyone who comes from anywhere west of Eighth Avenue is 'another Mark Twain.'"
Publishers Weekly - Garrison Keillor
"He recognizes the ordinary without ridiculing it, but his ordinary is loony enough for any South American magic realist....Far from an ideal of Norman Rockwell hominess, 'Lake Wobegon' reverberates with terror and finalities....Keillor's folk confront mainstream America with beer and trembling."
Time - J. D. Reed (09/02/1985)
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