The Palpable Game

Reading this history of hockey was a great nostalgia trip for me, recalling a gut-hatred of Eddie Shore of the Boston Bruins exceeded in intensity only by a boyhood hero-worship of the one and only Ching Johnson of the New York Rangers. With action models of bloodied professional hockey players, who needed astronauts!

Checking back is more than nostalgia, however. It is an organized documented history of hockey, starting with primeval slaughters on frozen rivers, recalling the game as it became collegiate and almost respectable, and finally describing the birth, growth, and development of professional hockey, specifically the National Hockey League.

Professor Isaacs loves the game. He brings to his account of it not only a wealth of statistics but also the anecdotes that give the numbers life. Off his pages comes the aroma of rink ice (branch water and ammonia), the belly roar of the stadium crowd when the goal light flashes red, referees gliding like gulls to retrieve the puck for another face-off, and that strange mixture of black tape, wooden sticks, blood, and writhing bodies crunched against the boards.

This is a great book for the hockey buff.

CHECKING BACKBy Neil D. Isaacs '53Norton, 1977. 259 pp. $9.95

Father Tilghman, rector of St. BarnabasChurch in Norwich, admits to some youthfulchecking back — and to spending time in theDavis rink penalty box as a Harvard hockeyplayer in 1940. He can't recall what earned himthose carefree two minutes, but he doesremember being handed some needlepoint tohelp him pass the time.