Shawn's signature tone... is a kind of canny naïveté, in which complicated questions are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles from the search for truth. There's something bracing about this when it works. But when it doesn't -- which is about one-third of the time in this collection (granted, a batting average Major League Baseball players would kill for) -- it can seem as though reductive clichés are being replaced with tendentious caricatures.