One Hundred Years of Hockey

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

A visual feast, this coffee-table book provides a chronological overview
of professional hockey in North America in the 20th century, with the
principal focus being the National Hockey League. Each of the book’s
five sections (“Early Years,” “The Original Six,” “The
Expansion Era,” “The Dynasties,” and “The Modern Game”) is
written by a recognized authority in the area of hockey journalism. With
more than 400 captioned photographs (most being of the game-action
variety and in full color), the text may appear to be a secondary
feature of the work. However, the authors have done a good job of
highlighting the major happenings and significant players, coaches, and
other people associated with their period of the game, and they have
done so in a way that has yielded fresh content.

The book is heavily weighted in favor of the post-Original Six time
frame (i.e., to the years after 1967). This disparity in coverage can,
in part, be explained by the increased use of photographs, many of them
double-page spreads, in the book’s later sections. Closing
photographic segments include the 1998 Nagano Olympics, oddly followed
by the 1996 World Cup and Gretzky’s retirement. Concluding tables
identify winners of the Stanley Cup, Art Ross, Hart, and Vezina trophies
through 1998. No explanation is provided for the exclusion of other
major individual trophies, such as the Lady Byng. A worthwhile addition
to public libraries’ hockey collections.