Product Description: One of the best-selling spoken audio of all time, this is the original collection of Garrison Keillor monologues. Funny and touching, these 20 stories from original live broadcasts of A Prairie Home Companion follow the seasons in Lake Wobegon.
Contents: Spring: Me and Choir; A Day in the Life of Clarence Bunsen; Letter from Jim; Fiction Summer: The Living Flag; The Tollefson Boy Goes to College; Tomato Butt; Chamber of Commerce; Dog Days of August; Mrs. Berge and the Schubert Carillon Piano Fall: Giant Decoys; Darryl Tollerud's Long Day; Hog Slaughter; Thanksgiving; The Royal Family Winter: Guys on Ice; James Lundeen's Christmas; The Christmas Story Re-told; New Year's from new York; Storm Home
Second copy I wore out the tapes and had to buy the CDs. These stories never get old!
On time, good condition The CD was sent quickly, arrived on time and was in great condition. Thanks!
My Favorite Lake Wobegon Set I own 6 of these multi-CD sets of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon stories and this is my favorite. His voice is strong and rich on these recordings. These are live broadcasts so there's a real audience to provide background chuckles that make me feel like I'm sitting around the fire listening with them.
The segments are Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. (Each one lasting about an hour.) They are comforting little stories that make me smile and relax me as I am drifting off to sleep.
If you are a Lake Wobegon fan, you will enjoy this set very much.
Some of the Best Lake Wobegon monologues - all right here! The 4 cassettes are titled "Summer", "Fall", "Winter" and "Spring". All have very funny stories on them and are worth the listen many times over. But the absolute best of the 4 tapes, and the biggest reason anyone should buy this collection, is the "Fall" stories. "Fall" (which I also found listed separately, and have left a review there as well) contains the single funniest Lake Wobegon monologue, "Bruno the Fishing Dog." It also contains a funny take on Minnesota Thanksigivings, and a devastating 24-minute epic called The Royal Family, which I found to be well worth the trip.
To me, Keillor-on-paper vs. Keillor-live is apples and oranges - they should be judged separately. If you do want to hear him, buy this collection--and the collection called "Gospel Birds", also a classic--and you'll be set for some time.
Stories generally good, but rarely funny I love Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days" book, but found listening to these original NPR monologues strangely unappetizing. His book treatments of many of these stories succeed better as humor because on paper he strives more for gentle laughs than to force something "tender" into the mix. This may also reflect the problems of writing and delivering a monologue on live radio every week. Consider the hilarious "Giant Decoys" story. On paper, and for most of the audio monologue, it's about the Sons of Knute lodge and their love of duck hunting, which includes the creation of enormous decoys big enough for ducks to clearly spot them from cruising altitude. In the original monologue, however, Keillor exits with a pointless talk about how writers and hunters both do crazy things and how the hunters need to keep their guns on safety when they're out in the woods whooping it up. It's telling that Keillor omitted this from the book version, and could probably have been safely edited out of the CD. Ditto to his "Christmas Story Re-Told," which seems unfocused, especially for a man whose books usually brilliantly send-up the Catholic and Lutheran faiths; his "Royal Family" bit is clever but overly long and too sentimental. That said, several of Keillor's more "serious" stories are remarkable; he seems at his most effective when he doesn't consciously pull at too many heart strings. His "Hog Slaughter" evokes a lot of ghosts from my summers spent on my relatives' rural farm, where an inner-barn room still bore red-painted walls from that (thankfully long-since-gone) ritual. The same track includes his haunting tale of the unfortunate Elizabeth June, a disabled woman so lonely she invented friends. Keillor uses a light touch with these, and it's hard not to laugh at the moment in church when poor Elizabeth loudly announces to her invisible friend that, yes, she will buy that car. Of his "straight" humor, Keillor seems at his best in shorter bursts like his "brought to you by the Lake Wobegon Chamber of Commerce" bit, in which he introduces us to Fr. Emil's summer replacement at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility -- a priest whose rambling sermons feature lessons learned while playing golf, and which include experiences gleaned during parish work in the Las Vegas diocese. His "Living Flag" monologue here is cute, but was better handled in book form. That tells me that while Keillor is America's sole live-radio entertainment stalwart, his humor is most focused and polished on paper.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
