A Look At Garrison Keillor's "Homegrown Democrat--

A Few Plain Thoughts From The Heart Of America"

What can I say about Garrison Keillor that we already don't know? He's simply wonderful, we love him, and each of his books are warm, funny, and insightful.

In "Homegrown Democrat" Keillor goes one step further, and offers pertinent, incisive, and much needed commentary about the nature of democrats as well as the nature of our country, and how we must preserve not only her majesty, but her humanity.

Keillor gives voice to the fear many of we Americans have that our cultural heart might be failing and our constitutional bones might possibly be brittle and crumbling; a concept that seems to many of us to be unthinkable, impossible, we're too young...and yet lately haven't we been feeling short of breath, limping, and unsure?...

Even when Keillor is informing, he is still always entertaining; read here an excerpt from "Homegrown Democrat", Chapter 8, "At The Café"...

"When I am gloomy about politics, I go sit alone in a crowed café in my neighborhood in St. Paul where the local art students like to hang out, intense young people with no clear prospects in life, and old gaffers and idlers and loafers and tourists from Iowa, genteel bohemians dreaming of the Dead and how it was to be 20 and discover Prévert and Camus. And well-fixed all-rightniks like me. I sit and inhale the smell of coffee amid the murmur of midwestern voices like water lapping on the shore...Today, the morning paper has left me feeling stranded in a nation more like the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914 than the sweet land of liberty....

At present, we (Democrats) are in our usual disarray and widely ridiculed by angry menopausal males who equate dissent with treason, but we Democrats do not faint to hear hecklers. The only shame is to lose heart...

There is a basic faith here in the café: if you work hard and pay attention and don't let the greasy tentacles of alcohol or drugs wrap around you and don't take some stupid shortcuts that land you in jail, you can thrive, and if catastrophe falls on you, earthquake or flood or fire, the others will come to your rescue. If a wrong is done to you, it will be addressed...

What I feel in this café is the social contract by which people pledge to comfort and support each other in time of need, which each of us will sooner or later come to..."

Pour yourself a cup of hot coffee, or better still, stroll to a café with "Homegrown Democrat" under your arm, park yourself at a corner table with a grandé coffee, and lose, or find, yourself in this book.

--Book Review by Karen