From baseball to Picasso, Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams, post-modernism to American foreign policy, these essays are an appealing mixture of polemic, politics, memoir, travelogue, and literary theory.

In a series of essays about the U.S., Greer relates how his mother''s obsession wih baseball is overshadowed by her distaste for the American invasion of Iraq, which ends a family tradition of watching the Toronto Blue Jays play their season opener with the New York Yankees in New York.

In another series of travel essays, he recounts being in India during the height of the Pakistan nuclear crisis, his conversations with monks in Cambodia, and his spiritual revelations in Venice.