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When the time comes to teach a university course on Toronto hockey, Deceptions and Doublecross will be one of the first things on the required reading list.

Anyone who followed the history series I did last summer will remember this book because I mentioned it incessantly.  While my focus was on the Livingstone angle and the fate of the Toronto hockey teams, the scope of this work by Morey Holzman and Joseph Nieforth is much broader.  They dissect the founding legends of the National Hockey League and attempt to lay out a corrected storyline that is actually a lot more compelling - though significantly less flattering -  than the version that has been peddled for the last 90-odd years.

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I was talking to PPP earlier about cutting back on the Leaf of the Day series so that I could periodically talk about other things.  I had another history series I wanted to do and it's nice periodically to shake things up a bit.  So the LotD will drop to the '84-85 Leaf on Mondays, a standard one on Fridays and also on game days depending on my mood.  Off days will now be freed up for other subject matter.

One of the things I wanted to talk about are hockey books.  There is a lot of great writing out there and I'd like to highlight some of it.  Now, I'm not on any publisher's mailing list (yet???), so it's not as though I'll be reviewing anything brand-new on the shelves unless I spend all my lunch hours skimming pages at the local book shops (not that that's a bad idea, though).

Of all the hockey books I've read, only one is allowed to be my favourite, and it is this one:

This is The Leafs in Autumn, by Jack Batten.

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