Hockey Book Reviews.com

It's Our Game: Celebrating 100 Years of Hockey in Canada Buy The Book - Amazon.ca - Chapters - Amazon.com From The Publisher: If every hockey player’s dream begins on a frozen pond, it reaches its pinnacle in a packed arena facing off against a bitter international rival. Could be the mighty Soviets. Could be the vainglorious Americans. Doesn’t matter, as long as the guys, and more recently, the women, who come from the farming villages, logging towns, and bustling cities of Canada show up to play the game the way we invented it to be played. That’s the way it’s been for a hundred years. No game matters more than the one that pits our best against the world’s best. From the earliest days of the past century, when milkmen still did their rounds in horse-drawn carts each morning, to the Sochi Olympics, where both the men and women stood on their blue lines with gold medals around their necks as the Canadian flag was raised. This beautiful book, with rare archival im...

Before Twitter, before 24-hour sports channels, long before fans watched highlight goals on their phones—long before something called a “highlight” had been invented—there was  Hockey Night in Canada . It was cutting-edge technology back then. Anywhere in Canada, a hockey fan could come in from the snow, sit down by the radio, listen to a game played in Montreal or Toronto, and experience the thrill of a game played hundreds, or thousands, of kilometres away. Before all of what we call Canada had joined Confederation, even before the “Original Six,” there was  Hockey Night in Canada  to define both the country and the game. Then, sixty years ago, another technological marvel changed the game—and the country—and launched the longest-running program in the world. CBC’s  Hockey Night in Canada , for the first time, was on television. At first fans worried that television would ruin the game. Now Canadians can hardly imagine the game without the CBC broadca...

Michael McKinley is a noted journalist and documentary film maker who is highly regarded in the hockey world. If there is one trait that best sums up the Oxford educated McKinley it is he likes to undertake new and different projects. For example, he has produced middle eastern religious documentaries for CNN while also producing episodes of South Park. Hockey fans of course know McKinley for the TV/DVD documentary Hockey: A People's History and it's accompanying book , as well as one of my all favorites Putting A Roof On Winter . Now he's pushing the hockey literary boundaries with his first novel, The Penalty Killing: A Martin Carter Mystery . Buy the book - Amazon.ca - Chapters - Amazon.com Hockey, unlike baseball, has not really transcended into the world of fiction which is why McKinley's leap into the genre is so noteworthy. True, hockey mysteries have been tackled for the Young Adult market thanks to Roy MacGregor and the fantastic The Screech Owls seri...

I had the great pleasure to interview Michael McKinley , who I consider to be one of the most fantastic hockey writers out there. His 2002 release Putting A Roof On Winter is one of my favorite books of all time. It also became the inspiration for the CBC documentary Hockey: A People's History in 2006. The DVD box set release was accompanied with a lavishly illustrated companion book . The book was released in paperback in 2009, complete with new material. I had a chance to ask Mr. McKinley about the Hockey: A People's History project. HBR: How did you get involved in the fantastic Hockey: A People's History project? MM: I wrote a book called Putting a Roof on Winter that tells the story of hockey from the first indoor game in Montreal on March 3, 1875 up until the 1972 Summit Series. CBC TV read it, and wanted to build a TV series—in a similar style to Ken Burns’ Baseball, though with dramatic recreations of games in HD –so asked me if I’d like to write the ...

When people ask me for a good hockey book to introduce them to this history of the great game of hockey, more often than not I recommend Michael McKinley's book Putting A Roof On Winter . Buy The Book - Amazon.ca - Chapters - Amazon.com This book is fascinating on a number of levels. First and foremost is the author's storytelling ability. While he is recreating a factual history of the game of hockey, McKinley makes the book read as if it is a dreamy story, too good to be true. The romance of the past makes you never want to put this book down. It gives a great account of the beginnings of hockey, introducing us to some of the key people responsible for the game's growth. The book offers us a great  trip down memory lane, stirring the memories of Howie Morenz, Rocket Richard,  for any fan who remembers a few decades back to players like the Rocket, and has even further, but fuzzy, memories of guys like Turk Broda or Howie Morenz. McKinley covers all the major ...