While I have a variety of opinions on the globalization (and commercialization) of American higher education and the use (and abuse) of adjuncts and graduate assistants as teachers at the university level, those thoughts will have to wait.
Sexton's tome should not be confused with light reading. While plenty of baseball books probe the spiritual side of our attachment to the national pastime (for me, most memorably in the recently departed Richard Ben Cramer's Joe Dimaggio and in Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer), Sexton probes the history of humanities spiritual quests through the lens of baseball.
From Aristotle to Sarte, the citations and reference points come thick and fast. My background is in literature, and while I've spent a fair amount of time with the deconstructionists, most of Sexton's arguments were too heavy for me to consider them enjoyable.
I had an especially challenging time with Sexton's personal allegiances: a Brooklyn Dodgers fan who became a Los Angeles Dodgers fan when his family moved to Southern California who became a Yankee fan while raising his son to love baseball back in New York City. My trouble wasn't Sexton's shifting loyalties (while I am first a Yankee fan, my National League attention has shifted from the Expos/Nationals to the Marlins to the Braves and back to the Nationals again), but with the argument Sexton built around those loyalties, an argument that speaks to his core purpose.
