Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park [Hardcover]

Curt Smith (Author), George H. W. Bush (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1999

Start with a text by former presidential speechwriter and Red Sox fan Curt Smith. Add Bill Goff's superb lithographs, the most beautiful depiction ever of Boston's Fenway Park. Combine these with vivid color pictures by some of America's best photographers showing Fenway Park before and during a game up close and personal, alongside essays by prominent writers, broadcasters, players, and politicians. The result: Our House: A Day at Fenway Park, the most lyrical and complete book ever published on this beloved park.

Our House details the highest deeds and lowest comedy of Fenway Park from its opening day-April 20, 1912, during the week the Titanic sank -- through today. This superb work on America's parish park includes the history, dramatic moments, household names, and soaring memories of a place millions consider an extended part of the family.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Just how sacred a shrine is the home of the Red Sox since 1912, Fenway Park? Listen to the late Renaissance scholar, Yale president, and baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti recall his relationship to this now fragile field of dreams, scheduled for replacement soon after the millennium: "As I grew up, I knew that as a building it was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid of Giza, the nation's capital, the czar's winter palace, and the Louvre--except, of course, that it was better than all of those inconsequential places." There are Red Sox fans who would accuse him of understatement.

A repository of baseball gold, Fenway was christened the same week the Titanic sank. Babe Ruth got his start there--as a pitcher. Ted Williams became legend there. So did Yastrzemski, Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, and Roger Clemens. Only Wrigley Field can stake a similar claim on baseball hearts. Our House relates the sometimes stirring, often jinxed tale of the Sox from pre-Fenway beginnings to the curse of the Bambino to the Garciaparra present with careful detail (including plenty of statistics) and obvious affection. But its most valuable asset is the impeccable taste the editor displays in choosing pieces from other writers, most notably Giamatti's hauntingly lyrical and always self-renewing "Green Fields of the Mind," and, in a surprise twist, "Rapt by Radio," a lovely reminiscence by John Updike about listening to Sox broadcasts growing up in Pennsylvania, instead of his usually anthologized paean to Williams, "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu." While all this might be enough to light up the scoreboard in another ballpark, one of Fenway's enduring beauties, of course, is that even in a cyberworld the Green Monster is still operated by hand. How much longer remains to be seen. --Jeff Silverman

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Masters Press (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809226642
• ISBN-13: 978-0809226641
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,096,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Our House" belongs in your house!, June 29, 1999

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Hardcover)

As a lifelong Red Sox fan, I really enjoyed OUR HOUSE. It's a lot of fun to relive the heartaches and thrills that make up the history of Fenway Park. This book brings that grand old place alive through the first-person stories of contributors such as President George Bush, Pulitzer-Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Updike, broadcaster Joe Castiglione, Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti, and others. They're all linked together by a lively and informed commentary by author Curt Smith. Of the three new Fenway books, I think this is the best. Shaughnessy's FENWAY has brilliant photographs, but after you've looked at them a couple of times, the book would just end up on a coffeetable. Since Smith's OUR HOUSE is primarily a collection of personal essays, there is so much to read, to return to. It's great summer reading, because you can pick it up and put it down, one memory-inspiring chapter at a time. And it also has some terrific pictures itself -- both classics from the past and color sections capturing a day in the life of today's Fenway. If only the Red Sox could be as successful as this warm, funny, and insightful book!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very good new book on Fenway Park, June 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Hardcover)

There are three new books out on Fenway Park, all timed for this year's All Star Game. Two seem primarily photo books in lush format. Curt Smith's OUR HOUSE is largely text, but with some nice photographs.

FENWAY by Dan Shaughnessy and Stan Grossfeld has the edge in the photography department, but FENWAY SAVED by Bill Nowlin and Mike Ross is a very close second, presenting some more unusual and artistic views of the park and better overall writing about the park. Curt Smith's text is enjoyable (and much longer than the other two books) but sometimes he seems to get too clever in his writing and he gets a little hard to follow. Obsessive fans will want them all.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Atrocious, January 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Hardcover)

Although the pictures are nice, albeit way too small, the "history" is all superficial re-hash, and very little of that is about the ballpark; most is about the franchise, and all those stories have been told better by others many times before. There's also an awful lot of filler here, and Smith writes in a very annoying fashion. He used to be a speechwriter for George Bush - Nuf ced.