Word: wobegon
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...BETTER COME HOME, by Garrison Keillor, with paintings by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (Viking; $15.99), presents the sage of Lake Wobegon in bardic mode, with a talking blues for cat owners. Puff disdains the low-rent cat food her master serves and hightails it for the big city. Her master pleads, "Come home, old Puff, come home to us,/ There's a lot of new benefits I'd like to discuss." No dice. "I saw her six months later in a cat magazine./ She was the Number One TV cat-food queen/...I could tell it was Puff even...
Garrison Keillor: The view from Lake Wobegon...
...enacted in a single 11-page chapter and merely augmented by bittersweet scenes of them pining at a distance. The uninitiated may find it startling that Bush's political director (Mary) was besotted with Clinton's master strategist (James), but political Washington is smaller and more inbred than Lake Wobegon. Now if either of them had been in love with a tree surgeon from Idaho, that really would have been something. Mary was the one who fretted that her relationship might hurt her career, which says as much about the G.O.P. as about gender. Her fellow Bushies kept warning...
...teaching women's and Asian- American studies at the university level. Her story sounds like every parent's dream come true, but it is hardly unique. Around the country, young people of Asian descent seem to embody the tongue-in-cheek demographics of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average." Working-world Asians, meanwhile, have produced a veritable galaxy of stellar performers in the U.S., from the arts and sciences to business and finance. Like immigrating Jews of earlier generations, they have parlayed cultural emphases on education and hard work into brilliant attainments...
...Keillor, whose Lake Wobegon monologues established him as the funniest American writer still open for business, leaves off direct argument just as women readers are taking a deep breath and checking their 3-by-5 note cards, and craftily retreats to parable. Zeus, lolling at a seaside cafe, is confronted by Hera's lawyer, who threatens litigation. The father of the gods turns the twit into vinaigrette dressing, pours the stuff over salad, then tells a waiter the greens are wilted and should be fed to pigs. "And bring me a beautiful young woman, passionate but compliant, with small, ripe...