Puckstruck
Distracted, Delighted and Distressed by Canada's Hockey Obsession
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Like many a Canadian kid, Stephen Smith was up on skates first thing as a boy, out in the weather chasing a puck and the promise of an NHL career. Back indoors after that didn’t quite work out, he turned to the bookshelf. That’s where, without entirely meaning to, he ended up reading all the hockey books. There was Crunch and Boom Boom, Slashing! and High Stick; there was Max Bentley: Hockey’s Dipsy-Doodle Dandy, Blue Line Murder, and Nagano, a Czech hockey opera. There was Blood on the Ice, Cracked Ice, Fire On Ice, Power On Ice, Cowboy On Ice, and Steel On Ice.
In Puckstruck, Smith chronicles his wide-eyed and sometimes wincing wander through hockey’s literature, language, and culture, weighing its excitement and unbridled joy against its costs and vexing brutality. In exploring his own lifelong love of the game, hoping to surprise some sense out of it, he sifts hockey’s narratives in search of hockey’s heart, what it means and why it should distress us even as we celebrate its glories. On a journey to discover what the game might have to say about who we are as Canadians, he seeks to answer some of its essential riddles.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a love of words as deep and impassioned as his love of hockey, Smith delivers a maddening opus for the ages. Drawing from a myriad of literature about the sport as the basis for his free-flowing text, the author takes the reader on a day-long skate down a twisted, frozen river, following but never catching the puck or the point. The text is all over the place, recapping the best hockey fiction one moment, and its contributions to the English language the next, with side stops just about everywhere fighting, helmets, missing teeth, captains, Lady Byng, the decision to retire, and God in hockey. "This is not the book I was going to write," he confesses at one point, and it is evident, with no strong backbone uniting the whole. Reading individual sections on their own the arrival of the Swedes in hockey, hockey sounds (foom!, ponk!), the hockey days of Smith and his family is a delight and a credit to the author's mastery of language and research. But ultimately, it walks a delicate line between academic essay and mainstream book.
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