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...