Sports Illustrated Fenway: A Fascinating First Century

As Fenway Park gets set to mark its centennial anniversary in 2012, Sports Illustrated celebrates America's oldest and perhaps most-storied ballpark on the occasion of its 100th birthday. In beautiful photography and stirring prose from SI's finest writers, the book tells the story of Fenway from its birth on a winter's day in Kenmore Square to its current handsome incarnation. Readers will travel from the early days of Babe Ruth, through the years of Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemskiand right up to the 2000s, when the hometown Red Sox won not one but two championships with stunning Fenway Park shining as it rarely has. The book explores the incomparable features that define Fenway: See Manny Ramirez peer out of the green door by the manual scoreboard and Dwight Evans reach to pluck a would-be home run out of Williamsburg. See a ball glance off Pesky's Pole and members of Red Sox Nation seated atop the great Green Monster as dusk falls behind the Citgo Sign. In these dazzling oversized pages ballplayers like Williams and Johnny Pesky and Jim Rice will come alive, but the book's exquisite images and fresh words go beyond the Red Sox to honor the park itself. Here, games of pro soccer and football have been played since the1930s. This was the sporting home of another Babe, quarterback Babe Parilli and his Boston Patriots in the 1960s. FDR spoke at Fenway. The Rolling Stones lit up a night. The NHL unveiled its 2010 Winter Classic before a soldout crowd. Soon Fenway Park will be officially designated a National Historic Landmark, but truly it has been that for decades-the baseball field that no fan should miss, a park that has been at the heart not only of a great American city but also of American sports and sports culture.