Hockey Book Reviews.com

Hockey Book Reviews.com is announcing the first ever Great Book Giveaway Contest. I will be giving books away to entrants in my trivia contests. To win, you must answer all trivia questions correctly. If multiple contestants answer all questions correctly, then the winners name will be drawn out of my well worn 2006 World Junior Championships hat. I'm going to start this off by giving away a copy of Jeff Rud's Canucks Heroes: Vancouver's Hockey Legends . You can read the review here . To win the book, contestants had to correctly answer 5 Vancouver Canucks trivia questions. 98 people entered, with 15 getting all 5 questions correctly. I put those 15 names into my sweaty, well worn 2006 WJC ball cap, and drew the name of Barry McLaughlin of New Westminster, British Columbia. Congratulations Barry! Here are the trivia questions, now complete with answers. #1. This Vancouver Canuck was nicknamed "Ox." - Roman Oksiuta #2. During the 1982 Stanley Cup finals run, Curt F

Prolific hockey writer Mike Leonetti set out to answer one of the most difficult questions in all of hockey. Who is the greatest Toronto Maple Leaf of all time? Not an easy question, is it? While Montreal has Rocket Richard , Boston has Bobby Orr , Detroit has Gordie Howe , Chicago has Bobby Hull and Edmonton has Wayne Gretzky , is there a definitive face of the storied Toronto Maple Leafs franchise? In fact, when I named the top 36 hockey players of all time a couple months back, I did not include a single player synonymous with the Maple Leafs. ( Terry Sawchuk and Red Kelly both made my list, but I think most people always view them, especially Sawchuk, as Red Wings) If you were to ask 14 different people you'd come up with 14 different answers. Well that's exactly what Leonetti did for his latest book project Maple Leafs Top 100: Toronto's Greatest Players Of All Time . Leonetti asked a jury of Mark Askin, Howard Berger, Joe Bowen, Milt Dunnell, Doug Farraway, Paul H

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE / OCTOBER 23, 2007 NHLPA, NHL AUCTION AUTOGRAPHED COMMEMORATIVE BOOKS TO BENEFIT HOCKEY FIGHTS CANCER Team Captains Lend Their Signatures And Support To Hockey’s Greatest Fight NEW YORK / TORONTO (October 23, 2007) – The National Hockey League (NHL) and National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA) announced today that autographed copies of Reflections on a Hockey Season: The 2007 NHL Year in Photographs will be available for bidding through auction.NHL.com and NHLPA.com. The online auction, which features books signed by NHL team captains and other prominent hockey figures, will commence on October 24 at 7:00 p.m. ET and conclude on November 7 at 9:00 p.m. ET, with proceeds benefiting Hockey Fights Cancer. Among the more than 50 copies of Reflections on a Hockey Season available for bidding is one book signed by both former and current Pittsburgh Penguins captains, Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby. A complete list of signed books available i

Not long ago, I reviewed The Hockey News' Top 60 Since 1967 . My buddy Lucas Aykroyd over at Hockey Adventure.com takes his review a touch further, going Behind The Book with his interview of author Adam Proteau. The interview unveils the intense and short writing period Proteau and co-author Ken Campbell had to go through, their impressions of the voting panel, and the somewhat controversial inclusion of Sidney Crosby. Check it out at Lucas Aykroyd's Hockey Adventure

"A special hello to hospital patients and shut-ins, the pensioners, the blind, all the people who don't get out to games but enjoy the hockey broadcasts..." Growing up in British Columbia in the 1980s I was the biggest Vancouver Canucks fan. I'm not exactly sure how that came to be though. The only thing more brutal than Canucks win-loss record in those days was their jerseys. It would have been a whole lot easier to be an Oilers fan. Hockey Night in Canada rarely showed Vancouver games. It was always the Leafs, sometimes Gretzky's Oilers. More often than not though my dad had the Montreal game on the French channel, watching his beloved Montreal Canadiens. These were the days before satellite tv and specialty sports channels. I had to rely on radio broadcasts, and our local station only picked up maybe 2 or 3 games a month. Living in the mountains made it impossible to find the Vancouver stations on the dial. But if I was really lucky the game would be sim

I'm not a fan of the World Hockey Association, or especially of the Indianapolis Racers. But I really enjoyed Timothy Gassen's Red, White & Blues: A Personal History of Indianapolis Racers Hockey 1974-1979 . I think the reason I enjoyed it so much is because Gassen's work is truly a labour of love. He has an obvious passion for his boyhood team, and it comes through brilliantly in his self published book. The other reason I enjoyed it was because, unlike many WHA topics, I was completely open and curious about the Racers. It wasn't hard to be curious about the Racers. After all, the two highest scoring players in NHL history both got the careers started as underaged juniors in the city better known for college basketball and auto sports. Yes, Wayne Gretzky started his career as a million dollar 17 year old in a Racers jersey. It didn't last long, just 8 games in fact. The financially troubled Racers moved 99 to Edmonton. In an effort to replace him, they gave a

Oh wow! I didn't know quite what to expect from McClelland and Stewart's 2007 release King of Russia: a Year in the Russian Super League . Let's just say I'm so impressed by this book that I'm almost overwhelmed. King of Russia is about Canadian hockey coaching legend Dave King's journey to the Ural Mountains to become the first Canadian coach in Russia. The book is based on King's daily diary, typically meticulous and refreshingly open, and polished up beautifully by The Globe & Mail's ace hockey reporter Eric Duhatschek . I personally consider Duhatschek to be the best hockey journalist out there for quite some time. Not only is he incredibly connected, thorough and respected, but he's got an easy to read and captivating writing style. So I guess I shouldn't have been so surprised how easily I was drawn into the text. But I was very pleasantly surprised just how compelling and fascinating the text is. One biography or well written

Ed Willes has gone down a road that I am very familiar with. Willes, hockey journalist extraordinare of the Vancouver Province daily newspaper, revisited his youthful memories of the 1987 Canada Cup only to find that the hockey he may have mythologized in his own memories was even more spectacular, more special and more impacting than even he realized. He captures it all nicely in his new book Gretzky to Lemieux: the Story of the 1987 Canada Cup I know the road Willes has travelled all too well. In 2002 co-author Patrick Houda and I released our first book World Cup of Hockey: A History of Hockey's Greatest Tournament , sort of an encyclopedic history of all the Canada Cup/World Cup tournaments. This project allows me to give a real unique review of Willes' new title. Firstly, I can attest Willes' book is incredibly thorough and well researched. I've always considered myself to be more of a researcher than writer, and I have exhaustively researched the 1987 Canada Cup.

The National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players' Association don't always work well together. But they, in tandem with Getty Images and Greystone Books , did an amazing job on the new book release Reflections on a Hockey Season: The 2007 NHL Year in Photographs . The book captures the highlights of the 2006-07 NHL season, headlining Vincent Lecavalier, Roberto Luongo, Martin Brodeur, Alexander Ovechkin and of course Sidney Crosby. The 150 photographs are nothing short of spectacular, although the lack of captions is puzzling. Actually I should correct that. Photo captions and credits are in the very back of the book as opposed to with each photo. On one hand that allows for the pictures to truly say 1000 words, but the lack of captions is a common complaint of the non-hardcore hockey fans I've shown the book to. The book also is fund raising endeavor for the NHL/NHLPA joint initiative Hockey Fights Cancer , now in its 10th year. Part of the proceeds of thi