In 1985, Keillor had been doing _Prairie Home Companion_ for nearly a decade and this volume was a semi-novelization of the stories he was telling about his mythical home town on the show's "News From Lake Wobegon" segment, frequently the best part of the show -- not because it was funny but because it was (and is) funny-sad, funny-sentimental, funny-bizarre, and funny-ludicrous. Another twenty years have now passed and we've come to know the characters of Lake Wobegon intimately: the locally wealthy Krebsbach family, Pastor Ingqvist and Father Emil, Herman Hochstetter and the annual Living Flag, the Sons of Knute, and the rules for visiting on front porches. But this book is where you'll found the multiethnic history of the town, how tiny Mist County was formed, and why neither of them appear on any map. Did you know the local paper, the _Herald-Star,_ got its name because it was bought by Harold Starr? Or why a Lutheran upbringing is likely to cause emigrants from Minnesota to compose their own Theses and look for a door to nail them to? (You'll find a hilarious and largely true list of ninety-five of them here.) Keillor has the gift of taking the small and ordinary, approaching them in a profoundly sympathetic yet skeptical way, and making them universal in their strength.
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