Perhaps says Gould baseball fans rely a little too much on the former what he calls

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Perhaps, says Gould, baseball fans rely a little too much on the former (what he calls "canonical stories") and not enough on the latter For, in certain cases, the two can work in harmony. But where Gould's writing transcends this genre, and where Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville should interest baseball illiterates, is in his application of evolutionary psychology to the ballpark.Broadly speaking, there are two distinct histories of the game - one is a mythical chronicle of the "national pastime", rich in characters, anecdotes and legend; the other is the exhaustive statistical record of personal and team performances (a result of the fact that the game has been played to the same rules, more or less, since the early 1890s). (And as in the evolution of baseball, so in the evolution of 3.5 billion years of life on earth - not that Gould says anything so crude in this collection.)Some of the myths surrounding baseball are enjoyably daft, such as the one, officially sanctioned by the game's Hall of Fame to this day, that credits one Abner Doubleday with the invention of baseball in 1839. The three Bs in particular (boxing, basketball, and especially baseball) assumed great importance in the lives of Jewish and other immigrants." Hence, young Stephen rooted for the Yankees, just like his father and grandfather.In his elegant, precise prose, Gould trots round the bases of the fan memoir, recalling characters and players such as Moe Berg, the catcher who became a US secret-service agent in the Second World War and William Hoy, the turn-of-the-century deaf player they called "The Amazing Dummy" (rather than cheer, fans would wave handkerchiefs and scorecards to applaud Hoy's successes). But he is also careful to emphasise how crucial baseball was to the American psyche in the 20th century, thanks to events such as the rigged World Series of 1919 and the formal racial integration of the game in 1947. Gould himself was the third-generation son of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants: "A dedication to a distinctively American sport provides the major tactic for assimilation. There are plenty of footnotes such as these in Gould's writing.

Soldiers at Fort Apache are said to have interrupted a scratch ball game to chase the escaped Geronimo; Japanese infantry are reported to have yelled "To hell with Babe Ruth!" as they engaged US soldiers in the Second World War; a baseball was found in the rubble of the World Trade Centre. It's a job which would test the skills of the needle workers of Bayeux, but Niffenegger trims and sews, embroiders and patches with effortless ease.With the mechanics whirring silkily away, Niffenegger moves on to the fundamental business of philosophy: who should win in the battle between free will and determinism. If Henry can travel to his past, he should be able to change the way events turn out in his present and future, shouldn't he? No. And yet Niffenegger refuses to turn her characters into cynics. She won't let them give in to the doctrine that nothing in life can be improved. Ultimately she reaches a just-about-sustainable philosophical truce. It cannot be proven that her characters haven't changed things.

Her guiding principle is that you alter other people by loving them passionately enough. What can we take with us when we go? Not possessions, not the fillings in our teeth, but "the heaviness, and the long experience of love - just what is wholly unsayable." Niffenegger is a master at saying the unsayable, so here's something unsayable, especially for her "lanoitpecxesikoobsiht".. From 1967 until his death in 2002, the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould taught geology, biology and the history of science at Harvard; from 1974, he wrote 300 successive columns for Natural History, many of which formed the basis for over 20 books; but first and last, Gould was a baseball fan. Between 1947 and 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants and Gould's team, the New York Yankees, dominated the major leagues.

Gould grew up in the momentous atmosphere described in the opening passage of Don DeLillo's Underworld (which takes as its setting the New York Giants' improbable 1951 National League pennant win). As he puts it in his introduction to this collection of baseball reminiscences, theorising and book reviews: "All New York City boys of the late 1940s and early 1950s were baseball nuts, barring mental deficiency or incomprehensible idiosyncrasy."Gould began writing about baseball in the early 1980s, and his contribution to the distinguished body of baseball literature is wide-ranging: from number-crunching analysis to fond eulogies at the passing of figures, major and minor, from the game This spectrum of subjects and styles is no accident. In the words of historian Jacques Barzun, which Gould quotes approvingly, "whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball."The game was first played professionally in the USA as long ago as 1876, and if you open up the locker of American history, five-ounce cowhide baseballs come tumbling out. That was followed by the sale of the loss-making US electronics company Teccor for $44m, and the metering business.A spokesman for the company refused to comment on the speculation yesterday.Invensys has already had to dampen hopes for its disposals programme. While it said in November that it expected to raise Â£1.8bn from selling off businesses, it said it no longer thought it could beat the target by a substantial margin.The chief executive, Rick Haythornthwaite, said then: "There are plenty of buyers out there and plenty of money but buyers are cagier than in the first batch of disposals. If they got one of those big ones away in the next couple of months, they'd be fine," the source said. "In the meantime, a fundraising would help matters."Invensys sold Baan, the loss-making Dutch software group that lay at the heart of its problems, for about Â£83m last summer.