Baseball vs. empire.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Briefly Noted - Brief article - Book review

Two themes thread through the work of the historian, novelist, and screenwriter Bill Kauffman: He celebrates the eccentric textures of American life, and he condemns the imperial institutions, from city planners to conscription boards, that threaten to rub those textures out.Poetry Night at the Ballpark (Front Porch Republic Books) collects some of Kauffman's best articles in both modes, from his mid-'80s days as a reason staffer to the present.

Here jeremiads against empire and the corporate state mix with tributes to the many faces of a flourishing regional culture: poets, painters, amateur scientists...