Curling: The History, the Players, the Game

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

In the space of very few decades, curling has gone from a game played
mainly in Scotland and Canada to an international sport, reaching
Olympic-medal status with the 1998 Nagano Winter Games. Hansen, a
Vancouver-based curling publicist, is Director of Event Management and
Media Relations for the Canadian Curling Association. He has been
associated with the sport for more than 40 years, as participant,
teacher, coach, equipment entrepreneur, media member, and event manager.
Curling is at once a well-produced coffee-table book featuring dozens of
glossy photos and a thorough, well-researched primer that covers the
game’s beginnings and its rather esoteric sets of rules. Chapters on
etiquette and the game’s fundamentals, strategy, and future are
well-written and skilfully edited, and the author provides a full index
and a useful glossary.

There is still a tendency to poke fun at a game the MSNBC Web site news
once described as looking rather like “horizontal darts on ice, with
big Fisher Price tea kettles as pucks. Or maybe hockey and chess blended
with billiards and croquet, then crossbred with a really good scrub of
the kitchen floor.” But never mind. Books such as Hansen’s, and the
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Curling (1998) have gone a long way to
legitimizing the game. Recommended for public libraries.