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Having covered the last two Olympics and every World Championship since 2000, Lucas Aykroyd is one of the world's leading ice hockey experts.
Here the Canadian journalist picks five books every hockey fan must have. Click to view Top 5 Hockey Books.
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Passionate Prose on Pucks and Power Plays |
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 Today, ice hockey fans have a million ways to spend their disposable income, from game tickets and team jerseys, to trading cards and DVD sets. But good old-fashioned books still provide unparalleled insights into one of the world's fastest, most skill-driven and most physically intense sports.
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Nowhere is this more true than in Canada, the motherland of hockey. The International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) has officially recognized that the first hockey game ever played was at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal on March 3, 1875. A literary tradition began two decades later, as player and Montreal native Art Farrell wrote Hockey: Canada's Royal Winter Game in 1899.
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 More than a century later, dozens of hockey books are published annually in Canada. That's understandable, as the nation of 30 million provides just over 50 per cent of players for the National Hockey League (NHL), the world's top pro league, and enjoyed a remarkable international run with Olympic, IIHF World Championship, and World Cup victories between 2002 and 2004.
Authors such as Andrew Podnieks, Don Weekes, and Brian MacFarlane have regularly capitalized on the predominant Canadian passion with Christmas-time releases, from historically themed coffee-table books, to trivia tomes to collections of famous hockey anecdotes. Other authors focus on international clashes, as in The World Cup of Hockey: A History of Hockey's Greatest Tournament by Joe Pelletier and Patrick Houda.
Excellent biographies include Georges-Herbert Germain's Overtime: The Legend of Guy Lafleur, which reveals the personal and professional highs and lows of the NHL's most exciting 1970s superstar forward, and Pavel Bure: The Riddle of the Russian Rocket by Kerry Banks, which does much the same for Lafleur's 1990s successor.
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All the Hockey That's Fit to Print |
 Even players better-known for their skill at fisticuffs rather than scoring abilities have immortalized themselves in titles such as Dave Semenko's Looking Out for Number One, Dave Schultz's The Hammer: Confessions of an Enforcer, and Tiger: A Hockey Story by Dave "Tiger" Williams. (To date, though, no one has done a book on why famous goons are frequently named Dave.) You shouldn't overlook the wealth of children's books, including Scott Young's Scrubs on Skates series, published in the 1950s, and the more contemporary Screech Owls mysteries by Roy MacGregor. Statistics aficionados devour the NHL Official Guide and Record book each year, while encyclopedias, such as Total Hockey and Kings of the Ice, supplement dry numbers with compelling stories.
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While hockey isn't as popular overall in the United States as in Canada, American writers have also made significant contributions to English-language hockey literature.
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 For instance, New York's Stan Fischler, billed as the dean of American hockey writers, has penned more than 60 books on the sport, some of the potboiler variety but also many highly readable ghostwritten biographies, including such 1970s favourites as Derek Sanderson's I've Got to Be Me and Denis Potvin's Power on Ice.
Russ Conway, a New England journalist, produced a classic investigative work in Game Misconduct: Alan Eagleson and the Corruption of Hockey, which details the misdeeds and downfall of the former head of the NHL Players Association.
With so many titles to choose from, picking five of the best hockey books is no easier than dodging a bodycheck from a 240lb defenseman or stopping a puck fired at 160mph. But the five titles we've spotlighted on ProductSifter.com are as surefire bets as the taste of championship Stanley Cup champagne or the weight of an Olympic gold medal around your neck.
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To buy these products try one of these retailers. They are competitively priced and reliable:
Amazon.co.uk - The UK arm of the world’s biggest book store
Amazon.com - The US arm of the world’s biggest book store
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Other great reviews in Sport:
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