Now Is The Winter: Thinking About Hockey

Now is the Winter is simply a fantastic collection of essays that, as the book's subtitle suggests, makes you think about hockey.

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Edited by university professors Jamie Dopp (University of Victoria) and Richard Harrison (Mount Royal University), the book is a collection of essays that looks at different aspects of the sport from social, political, and environmental vantage points.

The essayists are wide-ranging. They are historians, literary writers and sociologists from across Canada, the United States and even New Zealand.

Now don't fret. These essays may be written by University high-brows, but for the most part the book is far from a true academic read. Richard Gruneau and David Whitson's Hockey Night In Canada is fascinating but incredibly hard to read with it's unnecessary wordiness. Now is the Winter does not suffer the same pitfall. While the themes are not tied together like Hockey Night, the book is imminently easier to read and therefor more enjoyable.

Topics covered include globalization of hockey, community identity, sexism in women's hockey and the game in Canadian culture.

One of the more interesting articles compares the Stanley Cup's symbolism to that of Superman's. I also really enjoyed hockey's role in American sports fiction from 1890 to 1940.

This book is one of the few hockey books that truly achieves what all good books should do, but few hockey books ever do: that is to engage the reader into thinking about it's chosen topic. The essayists who contributed to Now is the Winter all achieve that to a fair degree.

Individual readers will find different essays more thought-provoking than others, but bottom line is readers will be compelled to think about what the game is, has been and can be.