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You don't need to know squat about wrestler-turned-governor Jesse (The Body) Ventura to read Keillor's book about Gov. Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente--he'll have you doubled up gasping for air, whether you like it or not. Writing in wrestle-speak unleashes Keillor's more rampageous comic impulses. He writes like Joe Bob Briggs, Ethan Coen, Hunter Thompson, and the young tall-tale-teller Mark Twain (whose characters the Duke and the Dauphin he steals). It's not just a Twin Cities tale, either. Once young Jimmy discovers Hank Hercules's mail-order bodybuilding course, he goes from Minnesota bully magnet to globe-straddling he-man. (The book's design echoes Charles Atlas ads.) In Vietnam, Jimmy kicks commie butt with the elite Walrus Corps and meets his lifelong stalker, the V.C. turncoat the Rodent. In Alaska, Jimmy joins the IWW wrestling circuit and makes the monocled bone crusher Oberkapitan Werner Wehrmacht, Vicious Eddie with the zippered cheek, and Dave the Postal Worker look like NPR-listening wimps. Jimmy wrestles a 1,200-pound she-grizzly, and he's man enough to keep interrupting his life story to pick fights with his amanuensis ("Mr. Keillor is a tired old hack with a gecko face and thinning hair and a body like a six-foot stack of marshmallows"). Can Keillor get even? Can Jimmy outwit the Rodent? Will Schwarzenegger's Hollywood pals provoke Jimmy to revise Luther's Small Catechism to permit illegal headlocks? Get the whole stomping lowdown. (And to find out most of what Keillor knows about wrestling, read Professional Wrestling: Sport and Spectacle.) --Tim Appelo
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