Martin Avery reflects on the place of hockey in the Canadian soul. Bobby Orr And Me flows from Avery's boyhood games in the Muskoka/Parry Sound region in the heart of Canada and it examines the globalization of hockey. Part memoir, part essay on national identity, part hockey history, Hockey Dreams is a meditation by a Canadian author on the essence of the game that helps define our nation.

Hockey Night in Canada has reached a great age (and for television, practically an immortal one) because it made itself into something that Canada couldn't live without. It is this surge of emotion that connected us all each week, and which connects us through the years to now. Hockey Night in Canada didn't just aim a camera at a game and observe what happened-it actively gave the country a prism through which it could see itself and its evolving diversity. We look where the eye of Hockey Night in Canada looks, and it looks at us. We remember what it remembers. We feel what it feels. That is the dynamic that has made the show much more than a long-lived TV success; it is a cultural juggernaut. Ask fans where they saw their first hockey game, and chances are it was on Hockey Night in Canada. Ask the players-male or female-what first got them into the rink, and the answer will be the same: they wanted to be like the players on Hockey Night in Canada.

A hockey memoir in poetry from the Cold War to the present in Canada, the USA, the USSR, and China, from Gravenhurst, Muskoka, to Dalian, featuring the big themes -- love and death.

A wildly evocative chronicle of the decade that changed hockey forever. "Lady Byng died in Boston" read a sign in the Garden arena in 1970, a cheery dismissal of the NHL trophy awarded the game's most gentlemanly player. A new age of hockey was dawning. For 30 years, hockey was an orderly and (relatively) well-behaved sport. There was one Commissioner, six teams and five colours--red, white, black, blue and yellow. Oh, and one nationality. Until 1967, every player, coach, referee and GM in the NHL had been a Canadian. And then came NHL expansion, the founding of the WHA, and garish new uniforms. The Seventies had arrived: the era that gave us not only disco, polyester suits, lava lamps and mullets but also the movie Slap Shot and the arrest of ten NHL players for on-ice mayhem. But it also gave us hockey's greatest encounter (the 1972 Canada-Russia Summit), its most splendid team, the 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens, and the most aesthetically satisfying game--the three-all tie on New Year's Eve, 1975, between the Canadiens and the Soviet Red Army. Modern hockey was born in the sport's wild, sensational, sometimes ugly Seventies growth spurt. The forces at play in the decade's battle for hockey supremacy--dazzling speed vs. brute force--are now, for better or worse, part of hockey's DNA. This book is a welcome reappraisal of the ten years that changed how the sport was played and experienced. Informed by first-hand interviews with players and game officials, and sprinkled with sidebars on the art and artifacts that defined Seventies hockey, the book brings dramatically alive hockey's most eventful, exciting decade.

The Longest Poem In Canada (Made In China): Spring, Again is Book One of a four volume series, a very long poem, part of The Great Wall Of China Book Series by Canadian author Martin Avery, in China, with 60 books and counting, plus 100 set in the West, as he aims to be one of the most prolific writers in history. The Longest Poem In Canada will be close to 1000 pages and 200,000 words. Collect them all! It's about the big themes: life, death, enlightenment, the end of the world, waking up, and life in Canada.

Winter, Again: The WorldÕs Longest Hockey Poem is Book Two Of The Longest Poem In Canada, by Martin Avery. Winter, Again alludes to Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, And Spring, Again. It's an epic poem about waking up, working on enlightenment, while checking out hockey online. It incorporates the greatest in hockey history and a poet's connection to the game after years of Zen training.

Line changes, limited time outs, and pucks traveling 100 miles per hour—hockey is called “the fastest game on Earth” for a reason. Keeping up with this non-stop action, especially for decades on end, takes a special kind of talent. Today’s NHL broadcasters capture the game in arguably the most difficult capacity in the world of sports, giving the fans a guide to the action in a way nobody else could. With careers outlasting the players, coaches, general managers, and, in some cases, the city itself, the NHL’s broadcasters have more than their fair share of stories to tell. In The Voices of Hockey: Broadcasters Reflect on the Fastest Game on Earth, Kirk McKnighttakes thirty-four of the game’s most gifted play-by-play broadcasters—including nine hall of famers—and shares their many insights, memories, and experiences. These broadcasters have witnessed all-time greats such as Gordie Howe, Bobby Hull, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, and Alexander Ovechkin, making them the ideal voices to pay tribute to the legends of yesterday and the heroes of tomorrow. The Voices of Hockey brings the reader down to the surface of the ice to experience overtime marathons, record-setting performances, bloodied fights, intense rivalries, and the raising of the Stanley Cup, with details and inside perspectives from some of the most qualified spectators of the game. From Bob Miller’s description of “The Miracle on Manchester” to John Kelly’s childhood recollection of Bobby Orr’s famous “flying goal,” this bookis truly an encapsulation of the NHL over the past fifty years. Generations of hockey fans will enjoy reliving their favorite moments and reading about those they missed in this unique and captivating view of the fastest game on Earth.

The Hockey Jersey: How Canadians Learn To Count To 100 is a book of poems about hockey, all about hockey sweaters, or jerseys, and the most famous numbers, from 1 to 99. This book explains the game's history and culture. Boys will love it.