RED SOX CENTURY: One Hundred Years of Red Sox Baseball.

RED SOX CENTURY: One Hundred Years of Red Sox Baseball By Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson Houghton Mifflin, $40.00

IN 1919, FRESH FROM MUSTERING out of the U.S. Army, my father left his village in Maine for Boston, an exciting city with an exciting baseball team. The Red Sox reigned as world champions, having won their fifth World Series in 1918. With Irish luck, he arrived just in time for Babe Ruth's last season, and he was hooked.

At Fenway Park, on the radio and television, he and his progeny took a seasonal ride to the giddy heights of 'Almost," to the last week, the last game, the last playoff (in 1948 and 1978), and the seventh game of the World Series (in 1946, 1967 and 1975). Neil Nolan died at 87 in 1985, a year before you-know-what dribbled under you-know-whose legs in the sixth game of a World Series game played you-know-where. I tell this shaggy-mutt tale because some of my friends have dined out on my punchline to this dynastic saga: "The Red Sox killed my father, and now they're coming after me." The phrase was much in use in Boston after Bucky Dent did his imitation of Babe Ruth in 1978.

In season and out, hope springs eternal from New England's rocky soil. This wonderfully irrational exuberance requires documentation. It has arrived handsomely and in vivid detail in Red Sox Century. Beautiful black-and-white photos and sound research into the icons and zanies who have populated Fenway illustrate what the wistful agony has been all about. Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson provide a clinical autopsy of gonfalonia interruptus.

They are also calm exorcists. Red Sox Nation is a Transylvanian village, awaiting the curse of the Bambino at every full moon. The authors approach what happened in 1920 differently: "If there is any kind of curse that haunts the Boston Red Sox, it's not one that has anything to do with the sale of Ruth. Rather, it is the way history has been misused to provide excuses for the real failures that have haunted the team."

While they prove their thesis, the authors wisely do not try to restore the image of Harry Frazee, the starstruck club owner whose name in our household ranked with that of Bendict Arnold and Judas Iscariot. Red Sox owners have often been unwise. A previous owner, John I. Taylor, impulsively traded Denton True "Cy" Young to Cleveland because he had won only 21 games in 1908.

In the 1970s, the Red Sox traded Sparky Lyle to the Yankees, where Lyle became an ace reliever, for Danny Cater, who did little. And my favorite piece of graffiti along Landsdowne Street, after the Sox dumped outspoken southpaw Bill Lee, was "Who is Stan Papi?" Traded for Lee, he was the Montreal infielder who hit .188 for Boston in 1979.

Stout and Johnson do not always dwell on gloom at the expense of glory. Most of the time, especially during the Thomas A. Yawkey era, Red Sox ownership was competitive and farsighted. Sox fans do not gush over their heroes, which is why retired numbers, displayed over the right field grandstand, are few. Nice guys who were popular or lasted a long time need not apply to this pantheon. The only way to get there is via Cooperstown. So far five have: Joe Cronin, Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Carl Yastrzemski, and Carlton Fisk.

Red Sox Century owes much to them as well as to the Al Zarillas and Willie Tasbys, the Clyde Vollmers and Don Buddins, the Denny Galehouses, and Calvin Schiraldis, all spearcarriers in this long-running opera that still plays to a packed house. For about half the cost of a box seat, the authors explain, illuminate, and document but do not attempt to console.

In 1997, after the Florida Marlins won their first world championship, I heard a happy fan on the radio say, "I've been waiting five long years for this." Five long years? At Fenway Park on every Opening Day, a fan carries an annually updated sign: "Every 83 years, just like clockwork."

"April is the cruelest month," T. S. Eliot noted incorrectly, "mixing memory with desire" Bostonians would insist that September and October, for all their autumnal glory, are much more cruel. Red Sox Century shows the seasonal ups and downs in exquisitely vivid hues.

MARTIN F. NOLAN writes for THE BOSTON GLOBE.