There were interesting bits here and there, or I wouldn't have kept reading. And I know these essays originally appeared separately. But seriously, when they were compiled into a book, didn't anyone read them and notice how redundantly redundant they were. My synopsis above is no exaggeration. I think he got paid by the number of DiMaggio mentions. He does a lot of name-dropping about famous people he's met, including Joe DiMaggio. Gould is famous as an evolutionist, which he can't help mentioning over and over again, which indicated just how brilliant he really is. My favorite spiel was when he explained that people embrace the myth that Doubleday created the game of baseball for the same reason they embrace the myth of creation, when, in fact, both baseball and the universe evolved. Right. He opens his essays with several pages of some theory or other, using the largest words he can find in the thesaurus and making no actual point. By the final three or four essays, I just skimmed because it was annoying and I'd read it all before.