Hockey Book Reviews.com

A full eight years before the Miracle on Ice, the US Olympic hockey team pulled off one of the most miraculous accomplishments in international hockey history. The 1972 US team stunned the hockey world by garnering a silver medal at the Winter Games in Japan. The silver medal championship was somewhat anti-climatic by today's gold-medal showdown standards. Back then the order of finish was determined by your win-loss record and your goals for and against. After upsetting the Czechoslovakians, Team USA sat in the arena in their casual wear awaiting the outcome of the Russia-Czechoslovakian game. When the Russians won, as expected, the Americans knew they had clinched a very unexpected silver medal, the only medal taken home by American males in the Sapporo games. The story is even more fascinating when you learn of the military background many of these players were drafted into before the games, including a few who wandered the jungles of Vietnam. Then there was the surprising camar...

Friends, I have made a mistake. In 2000, not long after his death, a coffee table book about Rocket Richard debuted. Chris Goyens and Frank Orr teamed up with Team Power Publishing to give use Maurice Richard: Reluctant Hero . At the time the book market was flooded with Rocket Richard material. I recall looking at this coffee table book and scoffing at the initial $50. Coffee table books, at least in the hockey genre, tend to be regurgitated photography with very little content. I put the book back on the shelf and probably grabbed a couple of other books for my $50, with the idea maybe I'd check this book out of the library one day. Boy oh boy was I ever wrong to dismiss this book so early. I finally got a hold of a copy, and I have to say that this may very well be the best book on Maurice Richard that I have ever seen. It is a coffee table book, so photos are front and center. But there are so many images in here I have never seen, from both on and off the ice. The photos rea...

Hockey is a game of great comebacks. Few comebacks are as inspirational as that of Walter Gretzky. Walter Gretzky needs no introduction. He is in every way the most ordinary, most humble and most likable man. But he is also the father and teacher of the greatest hockey player of all time. Wayne Gretzky once said his immense talent was not just god given, but "Wally given." His status as #99's mentor and father and his insightful teachings of the game combine with his amazing ordinariness make him not only a hockey legend in his own right, but the ultimate Canadian hockey dad. Any Gretzky fan has to be curious what it was like to in the Gretzky house. Walter Gretzky's book On Family, Hockey and Healing gives us not only a glimpse at what it was like for Wayne and Walter on their rise to hockey celebrity, but also about life on the farm, life as a telephone repairman, life as a less famous member of the household and finally life as Canada's most modest celebrity....

I finally cracked the spine on Gare Joyce's much acclaimed title When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game . The book covers the infamous Canadian-Soviet brawl at the 1987 World Junior Hockey Championships. "The Punch-Up In Piestany" featured the likes of Brendan Shanahan, Pierre Turgeon and Theoren Fleury vs. Alexander Mogilny, Sergei Fedorov and Vladimir Konstantinov. The incident is one of the most infamous in hockey history, yet, as Joyce leads us to discover, one of the most significant as well. Joyce is one of Canada's top sports writers, and almost certainly the tops when it comes to the junior hockey scene. His writing really does define him as "one of this continent's master craftsmen of sporting prose" who is capable of authoring "a superb piece of storytelling," as the book's cover boasts. They say don't judge a book by its cover, and that would be good advice to h...

The improbable story of Frank Fredrickson and his childhood friends probably could not be made up by the best of fiction writers. And that's the best part - the story of the Winnipeg Falcons is completely true. And it is all captured in Long Shot: How the Winnipeg Falcons won the first Olympic hockey gold by Eric Zweig. | Buy The Book At Amazon or Chapters | The sons of Icelandic immigrants and friends since boyhood, the Winnipeg Falcons were a superbly talented hockey team of just eight players who brought home Canada's first Olympic gold medal in hockey in 1920. But before they became world champions, the Falcons endured years of prejudice on and off the ice, and several close calls during combat service in World War I. And don't forget life-long infatuations with violins and aviation! This is the real life story of an underdog hockey team that would not quit and became world champions. It is written by author and renowned hockey historian Eric Zweig. The book is the qui...

Not evening aware of its existence, I recently accidentally stumbled up on the book The Best of Jim Coleman : Fifty Years of Canadian Sport from the Man Who Saw It All . I have to say I was wowed with the wide variety of not only hockey history, but sporting history witnessed and articulated by arguably Canada's most influential sports writer. The book is a collection of Coleman's best articles and columns from a career spanning over 50 years. The collection was put together by another of Canada's greatest sports writers, Jim Taylor. Here's how Ian MacIntyre of the Vancouver Sun describes the Coleman compendium: From Coleman's 2,500 columns, Taylor has selected stories about King Clancy, and Robinson before baseball's integration, about war ending and fish tales and bear tales and discovering, in 1943, that 1908 heavyweight champion Jack Johnson was on display in a freak show. Coleman's columns are a Canterbury Tales of sports as he introduces readers to col...

I was surprised to see Stephen Brunt's latest book Searching for Bobby Orr out on paperback already. It is also available in hardcover , and later in 2007 it will be available in mass-market paperback . Brunt's biography was the class of the 2006-07 hockey book season, bar none. I am a notoriously slow reader, but I devoured this book in only a couple of days. It is a super-easy read but retains the high literary quality that escapes so many hockey biographical books. A super job by Mr. Brunt , one of Canada's top hockey journalists, and beautifully designed by the folks at Knopf Canada and Random House . Searching for Bobby Orr is the perfect title. Everyone knows of Bobby Orr , but so few actually know him. This book allows readers from every generation to find out for themselves who Bobby Orr, hockey player and, to a lesser degree, person, was. Brunt represents a generation that grew up idolizing Orr. I've seen reviews from that generation which suggest the book of...

Reporting from the most northern communities of Canada all the way down to the Mexican border, journalist Bill Boyd takes a look at the state of hockey in his 2004 release All Roads Lead to Hockey . In the book Boyd profiles seven non-NHL communities, from northern Manitoba to Texas, from Michigan to Minnesota and Ontario to Virginia. It is more of a look at hockey at the interesting stories of the various grass roots levels in North America rather than glancing at the professional game. In each of the seven locations Boyd introduces us to people with a deep love for hockey who are ultimately troubled by problems that plague the sport. Boyd, obviously as disappointed in hockey's evolution as any of his subjects, talks about defensive systems, archaic coaching and the continued Americanization of Canada's game. I found Boyd's book to be more of a collection of short stories than a continuous read. While all 7 community profiles emphasize Boyd's chosen theme, somehow he n...