Ice Hockey Books

This was one of the latest and newest books regarding professional hockey that was published in 2007. It ended up being a great Christmas gift for my 14 year old Bantam Hockey Goalie!

If you love hockey then this is the book for you. Scott Morrison and all the faces you know from Hockey Night in Canada outline the famous and infamous who have worn an NHL jersey from #'s 1 - 99. Each jersey number has a featured player that is/was the best to wear that number.Great pictures of past and present players and lots of hockey nostalgia.
A great hockey resource you will go to again and again.

This book was published in 1987 but a goon is still a goon. The book is set up like a dictionary with chapter titles like "Tricks", "Dirty tricks" and "Ouch! Injuries". The Hockey Hockey reading and Source list is huge with many hockey books I never knew existed. Lots of information on older players, line nicknames, and French terms. Plus the price is right. One thing I wish it would have is the story behind the term "hat trick"

When i saw the cover i jumped to by this book, but after buying it I realized that i was a complete waste of time and money. There is just very little content and material that is useful to anyone with the slightest knowlege of hockey. It might be alright for the beginer, but beyond that level DON'T BUY IT!

This is what happens when a radio reporter tries to write. Never have I read a more boring book in my life. Here's some typical portions from the book: "I got up. I ate breakfast and read the newspaper. There was a story about so-and-so. Then I went to the rink for practice. I talked to so-and-so about the game that night. Then I went back to the hotel. I was bored, so I went to a movie. When the movie was over, I went back to my room, grabbed my things and went to the rink." It goes on and on like that. Really, folks, give this subject to someone who can actually WRITE and tells you about all the drinking and #$%@?! that goes with hockey people when they travel AND THEN you will have a book! I covered the NHL for a long time. I know of what I speak.

How this book got written is BEYOND ME. It was boring. It was written by a radio guy. It gets into the monotonous details of NOTHING. You wanna go on the road with a hockey team? Who cares what the author saw at the movies between the morning skate and game time! What we want to know is what go-go bars they were in and why! We want people. We want dirt. Yeah, that's what happens on the road in pro sports...but he didn't have the guts to break the old credo of "What happens on the road stays on the road." Think of this as a black-lined secret government document for sports.

In the rough and tumble world of hockey what Berger produces is a fluff piece. I wanted to know what life was like on the road for an NHL team during a season but all i got from it was Berger's panoramic views from the window seat in the airplane. Who gives a crap what the city skyline was like? Instead of offering us a hard hitting account, he offers us with buddy buddy schmoozing with a couple hockey players and the coach. It was obvious that the players didn't want him around. Hardly ever did Berger give us accounts of him being with the players hangining out after the game or on days off. The closest thing to it was talking with Doug Gilmour on the street but he left in a hurry to go see his momma.(I thought he was supposed to detail the players and the team not his momma.) If i was going to request access to cover a team, i would lay down what i wanted to accomplish for the book and if i couldn't come to an agreement with the team, then i wouldn't produce a fluff piece just to let the world know i was around some hockey players. If Berger's goal was to remain buddies with the players and management, then what he should of done was chronicle another team not so close to his heart.

Perhaps the most incredibly inane hockey book ever written

My title says it all. There were so many spelling mistakes and/or typos (including the one above in the bio of Tie Domi) that I gave up half way through the book. If the author and/or the publisher couldn't bother to produce a quality book I couldn't be bothered finishing it.

No consistency. Poorly written. Finished reading the book with an idea that the author put this book together on a few raint weeekends.

Jeff Jacobs is a genius. That isn't a word I throw around lightly, mind you; I reserve it for the true greats in any field--people like Alphonse Mucha, Peter North, and Ian Ziering. Jeff Jacobs, it turns out, is a genius in his chosen field of hornswaggling. I bought this book expecting a book about the greats of ice hockey. Ivan Lebre! Mike Liut! Pat Verbeek!

Instead, Jacobs has chosen to expose readers who unwittingly purchase his book to his invented brands of hockey. And boy, do I ever hope these aren't widely played. First, there are the expected, once you figure out you've been duped: the description of Tonsil Hockey, which I don't have to explain, is littered with Jacobs' fantasies about who he'd like to play Tonsil Hockey with: Michael Bloomberg, the now-departed Queen Mum, and a young man named Sameer for whom Jacobs seems to have an unrequited lust.

Then there's Genital Hockey, which as I understand it--I only read a few pages before skipping this chapter in disgust--involves slapping one's member repeatedly against used, unwashed sporting goods that once belonged to professional athletes (Jacobs is a big fan of Derek Jeter). Based on this chapter alone, this should not have been marketed as a pop-up book for kids. The same caveat applies to the chapter on Rectal Hockey.

All in all, a shameful book. I don't know why Honcho Publishing agreed to be a part of this fiasco.

Terrible. Easily the worst hockey book ever written. Ranking the Detroit octopus as one of his 10 greatest blue-liners? Unbelievable.

Mine came with pages missing.

Who knew there were so many legends in hockey? Peter Pan, Paul Bunyan, Bigfoot, King Arthur - the list goes on, and the author weaves their tales of mystery and puck handling with a style that would make Edward Bulwar-Lytton proud.

For example: "Centuries may pass, as centuries often do, as swiftly and silently as a giant and his blue ox skating into the neutral zone with 30 seconds left on a power play, but the stories of the legends - the true legends of hockey, must be told. And these are some of them."

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Jeff Jacobs is possibly the least talented sportswriter in the world, and I say this as a resident of a town that hosts the NY Daily News and NY Post. It is now my goal in life to find Jeff Jacobs and waste an amount of his time equal to the amount of time I spent reading his book, which was approximately 30 minutes until I decided my fireplace needed more kindling. This was back in June.

The Biblical book of Job is easier to read than this hack. My 5-year-old nephew writes more intelligently. If it weren't for spell checkers in the editing process his sentences probably wouldn't have periods. Or spaces between words.

On top of all this, Jeff Jacobs is a bad human being, who would likely use his position as columnist in a hartford newspaper to personally attack the lifestyle and hobbies of a coworker just out of spite, and likely because that coworker refused to share secrets with him. Not that this has ever occurred, of course.

I bought this book to learn how NHL hockey is played. I read the Complete Idiot's Guide Football and found it to be a very well organized, comprehensive description of the game. This book about hockey is nothing at all like that. If you don't know how hockey is played, you won't be any smarter after reading this. There are 298 pages of history and only 18 or 19 pages on the rules. You will learn what icing and offside penalties are and which way players are not allowed to hit each other with the stick and that's about it. Nothing at all about strategy and tactics and no glossary of terms. I was disappointed. If you want to learn the basics of hockey, look elsewhere.

I was disppointed in this book, especially since it was touted to have "comprehensive" rules. It has only one chapter on rules, and even then it barely brushes the surface.

If you want to know about the background of how modern hockey came to be, it's great. But I wanted to know more about strategy, rules, penalties, officials' hand signals, etc. and there is very little in it. Had I known what I know now, I wouldn't have bought it. Very disappointing.

alot of history not allot of strategy or technique.

This is not a book, but a fold out pamphlet. It's ok for a pamphlet, but I was looking forward to a book. Unless you just really want it, I would pass. Thanks!

This is a fold-out pamphlet. It's not a book. It's essentially a cheat-sheet for common hockey terms (e.g. blue line; major mis-conduct). If Mom just needs to get a basic understanding of the game through a list of short definitions this pamphlet is for her.

When I used to go to hockey practices, this was one of my best friends. I used to study it like many other autograph hounds I knew, so as to avoid the embarrassment of not knowing who someone was! It was a great tool to have. Every year, Ross puts a revised edition out. The last two years I didn't buy it, but this year decided I should.

To my utter dismay, she still has pictures from 1995 and even earlier! The stats, etc are alright, but the book is worthless. I could just go by my 1995 book! I really wish Ross would get some new pictures in here. That's what most people I know use it for! Until she does, I really don't see the value of buying another "updated" copy. Very poor.

I have this habit of leaving things that I am finished with -- CDs I've copied to my hard drive, clean old clothing, small household items that still work, books I've read and don't want to keep -- on park benches here in NYC on the theory that someone can still use the item and may like it better than I did. Many other residents do something similar curbside, as if the city were one big free flea market.

Such will be the fate of my copy of "Ice: New Writing on Hockey." Hockey is a terrific sport, all the more so as spring and the Stanley Cup playoffs approach. But it has never gotten its "Bang the Drum Slowly" or "The Natural" (baseball) or "A Fan's Notes (football). "Ice," a collection of short stories, essays, and poems, doesn't even come close. Amid way too many images of frozen ponds and getting up at 5 AM to drive long distances to kids games (many of the works here stress the family connections of hockey, another of the wonderful things about the sport) only a couple entries are worth a second read -- e.g. Hockey Night in Metabetchouan, Hockey Nights and Naked Ladies, and -- perhaps only because I'm a Red Wings fan -- Return of the Dogman -- and even these are marred by a curious compulsion to wrap up the piece with an unnecessary one or two line coda.

hockeydb.com is a much better source for hockey stats info and that is free yes the stats are good and it is nice to have them on hand without a computure but really why would you need them if your at a game you'd have to search through the book to get what you want

First of all, this book and the instructions in particular are very confusing. This is coming from someone who has been skating and playing hockey for several years. There are no illustrations to accompany the instructions, just useless snapshots of a hockey game in progress. This would be my last choice for a hockey coaching book.