SOURCE: "Boys Will Be Boys," in The New York Review of Books, January 13, 1994, p. 19.

In the following review, Adams asserts that, "It's not likely that [The Book of Guys will give rise to much prolonged reflection, but it can hardly fail to provoke a number of chuckles."]

Though in colloquial usage it's become something else, a guy began as a dummy, something to kick around, and out of a number of such masculine boobies, Garrison Keillor has made a book. Keillor has done sketches of this nature for recital on television—he is best known as the laureate of Lake Wobegon—and many of these fantasies-satires-diatribes would not be out of place in the saga of that freshwater metropolis. One thing The Book of Guys is not is a comprehensive report on the state of guydom in America. Keillor's guys are a hen-pecked, downtrodden bunch, to be sure...