I'll take my stand ... Yankee style.(Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette)(Book Review)

Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette By Bill Kauffman Henry Holt, 224 pages, $22

TAE associate editor Bill Kauffman writes with a certain petulance and a decided panache. There is a puckish edge to his sentences. He is a contrarian writer who wraps his angst in a wonderfully successful Menckenesque humor. And his anger is directed against those progressivists and centralists who appear with startling regularity in small-town America, determined to educate and enlighten the provincials and lead them to the New Tomorrow via "urban renewal."

Kauffman has coined the term "placeist," and his place is Batavia, New York, as well as the surrounding "burned over country." His book, Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette is autobiographical, historical, and laugh-out-loud funny. Kauffman targets bureaucrats, the "progressivists" at the chamber of commerce who never seem to get the point, the languid newspaper editors and dull-witted reporters who parrot the statist line, and the benighted citizenry that steadfastly refuses to involve itself for fear it might miss an episode of "Friends." He has great praise for people who rise up and challenge the managerial elite at the risk of being labelled "curmudgeons ... and mossbacks."

Kauffman weaves a picture of what Batavia once was; its buildings and those who built them, its stores and those who ran them, the neighborhoods--both north and south of the train tracks--and those who lived there. It is a town built on the diversity of cultures defined by Irish, Italian, Polish, and German immigrants; and before that, on a culture established deep in the dark, friable soil by hardbacked English-American settlers who lived in a time when a Seneca warrior might still lift your scalplock.

Batavia and its environs have spawned a plethora of significant writers, such as John Gardner, and Kauffman provides both humorous and sad anecdotes about them. He regales us with stories of the elderly, eccentric doyennes of the various clubs and organizations who remembered old Batavia and who fought the good fight against the progressivists. Kauffman's historical perspective of old Batavia includes a ...