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What: The United States Figure Skating Assn. “The Official Book of Figure Skating”.

Price: $30 (Simon & Schuster Editions).

Figure skating, we are told in the publicity literature for this book, is North America’s second-most-popular sport, right behind football.

Figure skating has reached such a height largely because, four years ago, one of its most renowned practitioners stooped to an unconscionable--and publicly fascinating--low. That would be Tonya Harding’s hired-henchman assault on the kneecaps of Nancy Kerrigan, a saga so bizarre it had wrestling fans watching the ladies’ short program from Lillehammer.

Yet you would never be able to glean as much from “The Official Book of Figure Skating,” sanitized for your protection by the U.S. Figure Skating Assn. L’affaire Tonya-Nancy receives two scant mentions in these 266 pages, whereas “Skating Fashion,” that gripping tale of sequins and shrinking hemlines, gets 20 pages.

This is the gloss-over-the-potholes story of figure skating. Serious readers will be disappointed in the thumbnail biographical treatment given to the sport’s legends. Bare-bones facts, yes. Personalities? Sorry.

Better executed is the history, which recounts how Jackson Haines, an American skating pioneer of the 1860s, “in some shows . . . dressed as a woman, or even as a bear.”

Some traditions remain unscathed.