Each week, the Ira Glass-produced-and-hosted public-radio program This American Life gathers together stories taken, in one form or another, from everyday life, then delivered with such effortlessness that the show has become easy to take for granted. It's a given that, on any given weekend, Glass and a rotating series of correspondents both familiar and unexpected will offer pieces as humble in focus as they are expansive in scope. So while a collection like Stories Of Hope And Fear might seem a bit redundant given that This American Life's high-quality programming is, at most, only a few days away at any point, this two-disc collection isolating some of the show's best pieces is a reminder of how good the show it usually is.
The theme here is, as the title suggests, the things we hope will never happen and the things we fear somehow will, and while there's nothing particularly Christmas-related beyond the title, the pieces here are well-suited for a reflective December. On "Infinite Gent," Alex Blumberg interviews Griffin Hansbury, a female-to-male transsexual who reflects on the changes he experienced upon becoming a man, many of which reflect the oldest sexual stereotypes around. "On Hold No One Can Hear You Scream" recounts an epic battle with a phone company and the emotional rollercoaster brought about by a billing error. The heartbreaking "Anti-Oedipus" recounts unexpected turns taken by a family dealing with health crises and sexual identity. Breaking into fiction, David Sedaris' "So A Chipmunk And A Squirrel Walk Into A Bar" uses the framework for a bad joke to explore a life of unconventional paths not taken. Not much connects the pieces apart from the explosion of the unexpected and the profound out of the mundane. What the show does best, in other words.