Suburban Studies, Part I

A. Bartlett Giamatti, former president of Yale University who served for a short time as commissioner of Major League Baseball, was fond of noting that the word “paradise” comes from the Persian that means “enclosed green space”– a baseball field, in Giamatti’s context.   I’ve always been taken by the juxtaposition of human architecture and the natural world, whether it’s the manicured quads of Oxford or the grounds of Fenway Park.