Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park
Start with text by Curt Smith. Add Bill Goff’s superb four-color lithographs, sprawling color and black and white photography, and essays by famed writers, broadcasters, and politicos, including George H.W. Bush, Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Updike, Peter Gammons, Ned Martin, Joe Castiglione, and A. Bartlett Giamatti.
The result is Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Masters Press, 1999, 290 pages), the definitive book about an American institution. Opened on April 20, 1912—the week that the Titanic sank—the home of the Boston Red Sox is baseball’s oldest major-league park. Our House captures Fenway Park’s odd angles, intimate seats, and inviting Green Monster: an alchemy of look, sound, and feel.
Our House has three special features any baseball fan will love: archives of historic photographs, a panorama of contemporary photos taken before a game in the Fens, and a gallery of Goff’s art. An exhaustive appendix traces the Olde Towne team’s arc from baseball’s first World Series (1903) to Mo Vaughn’s exile (1999)—the Red Sox as baseball’s first dynasty, then mirror of what-if, how-close defeat before a first world title in 86 years.
Reading this definitive work on the drama, history, and heartbreak of “Baseball’s Basilica,” even Yankees fans will grasp Fenway’s massy, light and dark, bewitching and enduring pull.