Hockey Book Reviews.com

Now is the Winter is simply a fantastic collection of essays that, as the book's subtitle suggests, makes you think about hockey. Buy The Book: Amazon.ca - Chapters - Amazon.com 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...

I'm just starting the book Now is the Winter , and to say the least it is very promising if not already spectacular. It is an academic's view of hockey, somewhat of a rarity in the sport. Editors Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison explain in the book's introduction: "There was (and still is) a massive body of hockey writing in Canada; however, most of it was hockey journalism chronicling the exploits of colorful players, teams or eras, and rarely, if ever, studied in the academy. Hockey-related biographies kept fans happy, but weren't curriculum material - the lone exception lying, perhaps, in Ken Dryden's groundbreaking and meditative 1983 memoir, The Game. And though there were also many hockey histories, events in hockey rarely figured in textbooks on Canadian history as a whole, with the exceptions of the Richard Riot in 1955 because of its connection with the Quiet Revolution, and the 1972 Summit Series because of its links to the Cold War. Both of these were...