Dry Ice

An agnostic’s guide to our favourite game, Artificial Ice: Hockey, Culture and Commerce is a collection of academic essays that question what it would call media-sponsored myths about Canada’s hockey past, while offering additional pieces that are skeptical of the game’s professional future in the United States.

Speaking as an occasional hockey writer, I was looking forward to the collection for a number of reasons. The book’s co-editors, professors David Whitson and Richard Gruneau, are authors of Hockey Night in Canada: Sport, Identities and Cultural Politics, a maverick compendium that had shrewd, interesting things to say about how hockey has evolved into a self-serving public relations construct. Or as Whitson and Gruneau put it:

Hockey has acted as a medium not just of the expression of Canadian identity but also for the reaffirmation of a preferred version of national character: tough and hard...