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Showing posts from May, 2007

Long Shot: How the Winnipeg Falcons Won the First Olympic Hockey Gold by Eric Zweig

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

The Best of Jim Coleman

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

Searching For Bobby Orr

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