Hockey's Golden Era: Stars of the Original Six

I bought this for my grandson,age 14 to learn about the game and the players . he was very happy with the gift. it has pictures of the stars and names and history of the game in all we were both pleased to get the right book to show how the games started with the six teams that began it all.

As others have noted, the book is not only informative but entertaining. Barkley's photos set the tone brilliantly for a look at the game in earlier days. Where today players wear helmets and masks, then Barkley's close-in style highlighted the emotion of the game by vividly showing players' faces. The illuminated, rapid-fire sports photography of today loses the luster of Barkley's contrasted shots that make it seem as though there is only the players and the ice surface, which he lit with his own set of lights along the glass hours before each game. A must-have along with Kevin Allen, Bob Duff and Johnny Bower's "Without Fear."

I own many hockey books, and this book is, by far, the one I open up most often. Each picture takes you into a world of NHL hockey that has long passed away. The beautiful full-color photographs will cause you to forget that they are images of the fastest moving sport in the world. It's as if the players have posed for the camera in an attempt to recreate hidden moments of the game. The facial expressions alone will capture your eye. You'll find yourself scanning every detail of the pictures, looking for that elusive black puck (and you'll find that puck in nearly every picture). This book is a pure treasure for fans of the game of hockey, in particular those fans who remember the simple days of 6 teams, 120 players, 1 Cup.

You can literally spend hours looking at this book and not tire of the images. They're so life-like it's eerie. Harold Barkley's strobe photography techniques give the pictures a "3-D" quality that is completely absent in today's "flat" images. Of course, the fact that the stars in the photos are from the "Golden Era" (50's and 60's) make the book all that much better. These stills make you yearn for the hockey of yesteryear, even if you weren't there! The flat sticks, the glossy narrow skates, the bryl-cream donned hair (helmet, what helmet?) - it's all here right down to the ice-shavings littering the goal crease, all in awesome detail.Frank Selke's introduction is excellent as well. Here is a man that makes no bones about why this was hockey's greatest era. My favorite example - fights were seen as a gentlemanly way to settle differences, not as an indication of a sport gone awry with "violence". My only complaint is that his anecdotes are only a few pages rather than a few chapters.But the photographs are really what this book is about. Sure, the statistics and history of each player featured are there, but I found my eyes continually wandering from the print back to the image - they're that good. It's tempting to cut them all out and frame them.This book will be enjoyed by any hockey fan, but if your over 40 it will be a treasure.

Wow! Buy this book just for the fabulous photographs taken by Harold Barkley, a long-time photgrapher with the Toronto Star. Barkley pioneered the use of the strobe in sports photography, and the detail he captured in these bright color photos is phenomenal--the texture of the ice, the meticulously greased and combed hair on the players, the rows of dark-suited spectators in the audience. This is how hockey used to look! The text consists of 1-2 page spreads on individual players of the day. The stars are all here, of course, but more interesting, to me anyway, are the players who've slipped from memory--Andy Hebenton, Norm Ullman, Camille Henry, Elmer Vasko. These names ring bells for fans who grew up in that era, but you seldom hear them now. Yet, here they are, preserved for us both in prose and in pristine photographic detail. This book's a gem.