Customer Reviews

News from Lake Wobegon

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

Garrison Keillor's tender and often times hilarious tales of small town life are so rich in imagery, you are at once swept up into his world and more than a little sad when it ends. I have listened to all of Keillor's Lake Wobegan stories, and this tops the list as far as I am concerned...why? Because in this, one of his first outings as storyteller, the stories are primarily intended to capture the feel of nostalgia we all long for, rather than to simply amuse as in some of his later stories, particularly those found on Life These Days and some of his later material. While those later stories also have their own appeal, the earlier stories tug at the heart in a way some of the newer ones fail do. Listening to Summer, I could almost hear the whining of that old window fan which our only relief from the hot summer sun, smell those ripe and even overripe tomatoes in mom's garden, hear the soothing sounds of the crickets at day's end as mama's calls "Supper time!" Keillor is a GENIUS at taking us back to the good old days, not just in our heads, but in the very depths of our being...once there, you never want to leave! Winter stirs in us the memory of a cold, clear night, perhaps watching at the window for a glimpse of Santa's sleigh as it streaks across the evening sky, or standing in front of a Main Street department store lit with thousands of tiny lights as animated figures dance and sing for our amusement...childhood captured in all its wonder for us to experience all over again. Spring is filled with humor and pathos, particularly Letter To Jim...in this bittersweet story, we can all relate to the feelings of unrest and longing that come to us all at some mid point in our lives, and in that moment of indecision about which road to follow, we can FEEL the tugging in both directions and are waiting for the ending and hoping it will be the one we KNOW is right. Fall is likewise beautiful, you can smell the burning wood, feel the damp chill, and see the pumpkins in our mind's eye...Thanksgiving is my personal favorite, just a heartwarming telling of family holidays spent with our 'favorite relatives'. These stories make you yearn for that simpler, more tender time..and as far as I'm concerned, the further away we get from it, the more story tellers like Keillor we need with the ability to bring us back whenever we choose to go there! Bravo, Mr. Keillor, long may you reign!

This is a very good CD for family listening during a long road trip. The stories are quite good, clean, and appropriate for any age group.

I wore out the tapes and had to buy the CDs. These stories never get old!

The CD was sent quickly, arrived on time and was in great condition. Thanks!

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.