All-Time Book of Hockey Lists

Since earning his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 1992, Andrew Thomson has taught Canadian history at several universities, most often at Wilfrid Laurier University. For the past 16 years, he has created and taught a wide range of Canadian history courses from the history of French Canada to Canadian business history. Dr. Thomson has written for The Dictionary of Canadian Biography and been a guest lecturer at Kitchener Public Library’s Ideas and Issues series. He has recently been an active instructor in the Lifelong Learning program at Wilfrid Laurier. Dr. Thomson is also the Academic Reviewer for the Business History section of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada and also works with the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier.

The “all-time” is debatable, but this is certainly a book of lists.
They begin without any introduction, without any meaningful attempt to
place them in some sort of context, and without any apparent criteria
for topic selection, and they end in the same way—without comment.
None of the lists are statistical, or in any way based on empirical
information. Many are simply inane (e.g., “the most relevant hockey
people whose name begins with ‘n’”). It is difficult to take
seriously a hockey book that ranks Bobby Orr as only the 14th-best
player of all time, or that fails to include the Sutter brothers in a
list of the best “brother acts.” This book will be of interest to
friends of the Fischlers, but to few others.