Holiday Gift Guide: The NHL: A Centennial History by D’Arcy Jenish

First, it should be noted that we’re jumping the gun slightly on the centenary. The National Hockey League will not turn 100 until 1917. But heck: why wait? The league’s detractors sometimes seem certain the NHL won’t even last that long. I’m predicting they’d be wrong.

Author  D’Arcy Jenish (The Stanley Cup: 100 Years of Hockey at its Best, The Montreal Canadiens: 100 Years of Glory) clearly knows his way around a rink. Also, well-received and conceived earlier works paved the way -- in all ways -- for The NHL: A Centennial History (Doubleday Canada).

And Jenish has stepped up here. Wrong image for this sport, though I guess. Shall we say he’s covered the ice well?? Or…? Whatever the metaphor, Jenish has done it up properly, creating a history that is not only interesting, complete and comprehensive, it’s celebratory in tone without being cloying.

Though there are many components to the successes and struggles of the NHL, two major forces are, of course, at play here: the sport the fans see on the ice and the less obvious competitions that happen in the business offices of the league. And sometimes -- too often? -- it’s difficult to tell which one is more important.

Serious hockey fans will not want to miss this most intimate portrait of the National Hockey League, brave traditions, warts, and all. ◊


Aaron Blanton is a contributing editor to January Magazine. He’s currently working on a book based on his experiences as an American living abroad.

Holiday Gift Guide: “Mr. President” by Harlow Giles Unger

Would it even be the holidays without a political biography for dad from Harlow Giles Unger (Lion of Liberty, John Qunincy Adams).

“Mr. President”: George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office (DaCapo) is a very good book in a series of them. In his typically lucid and conversational style, Unger paints a never-before-seen portrait of Washington as a surprisingly beleaguered leader whose challenges in many ways echo those of the current occupier of the White House.

Though much has been written about that first presidency, no one has ever looked at it in quite this way before. But Unger has that gift and also that advantage, having done serious research on men whose presidencies touched this one.

Unger shows us a Washington early in his presidency, a figurehead at the head of a country but without much power at all. Then, slowly but steadily, Washington manages to wrest more and still more power for his office, including the “executive privilege” Presidents expect today.

Though some of Washington’s tactics in gaining power for his office expose a single-minded determination to his mission and even, on occasion, a deadly intelligent cunning, Washington emerges as a good and even worthy President. Unger has said that it is his opinion that Washington was “probably the most selfless, self-sacrificing president in American history.” ◊

Aaron Blanton is a contributing editor to January Magazine. He’s currently working on a book based on his experiences as an American living abroad.

Holiday Gift Guide: Eragon: Collector’s Edition by Christopher Paolini

The story of how Eragon (Knopf Books for Young Readers) came to print is as magical as anything that happens in this fantastical series.

Los Angeles-born, Montana-raised and entirely homeschooled, Christopher Paolini was 15 when he began to write what would become Book One in the Inheritance Cycle.

Paolini and his family self-published the book in 2002, selling almost 10,000 copies through a concerted family effort to move the book. Then the big break: bestselling author Carl Hiassen was vacationing in Montana. A bookseller gave the author a copy for Hiassen’s then 12-year-old stepson. The kid loved the book, and said it was even better than Harry Potter. Hiassen called his editor at Knopf who didn’t waste a lot of time in signing this wunderkind with a pen to a publishing contract.

Knopf released their first edition of Eragon in 2003 when Christopher was 19. The rest, as they say, is history. Within six months, the Knopf edition had sold a million copies and his second novel, Eldest, sold close to half a million copies within a week of publication, making it the fastest selling title in Knopf’s history. Now not quite 30, Paolini is given rock star treatment when he makes public appearances: greeted by screaming fans in the thousands.

This 10th anniversary collector’s edition of Eragon was released in October of this year, very much with the holiday buying market in mind. The book is bound in faux-leather embossed with gold foil. Inside are six original colour illustrations by award-winning artists: Michael Hague, Donato Giancola, Ciurelo, John Jude Palancar and Raoule Vitale. It all makes for a pretty expensive package, but this is likely intended to be a gift for someone who already know and loves Paolini’s work and will cherish this special edition.

Holiday Gift Guide: A Christmas Hope by Anne Perry

It’s gotten so I look forward to Anne Perry’s annual Christmas offering almost as much as my beautifully decorated tree, plum pudding and my children’s faces on Christmas morning. It’s become another tradition, for me and a personal treat. And, truly? I should wait and see if it appears under the tree, but I never do. (And so it never does.)

A Christmas Hope (Ballentine) is Perry’s 11th Victorian Christmas mystery and, like the others that have come before, it is charming and dependable. Pretty much, really, just the way Christmas should be.

Claudine Burroughs is dreading Christmas. It is, to her, the worst of all seasons, forcing her to face up to the fact that the dreams and aspirations she’d held earlier in her life are fading fast, along with -- she fears -- the faint good looks she had. The coming of Christmas only serves to remind her of all she has not -- and likely will not -- attain.

This is the mood she is in when she meets Dai Tregarron at a party. He is a poet who makes her feel a glimmer of the spirit she once had. An hour later he is accused of a horrible crime: killing a young prostitute who had been smuggled to the party. Claudine believes in Dai’s innocence and sets out to prove it and in the course of her investigation, she discovers secrets that will shock her fashionable London set to its core.

Thank goodness, however, it is Christmas, the season of miracles, and anything is possible. Claudine is able to come up with a resolution that not only clears her new friend, but celebrates the best of the season in a number of ways.

Perry’s many fans know that her Christmas books do not feature the very best of her writing or the snakiest of her plots. However, they are warm, charm-filled and absolutely of the season. Happy holidays! ◊

Holiday Gift Guide: Painters and the American West: Volume II edited by Joan Carpenter Troccoli

Art books make terrific gifts. Though they can be a little heavy for mailing, it’s easy to tailor your choice to the person you’re gifting, though finding the right art book for the right art lover is a big part of getting it right.

It seems to me you’d have a tough time going wrong with Painters and the American West: Volume II (American Museum of Western Art). It’s an impressive -- almost epic -- book, beautifully produced and lovingly annotated. It’s just a splendid art book, from any angle.

In a foreword, scholar and curator John Wildmerding offers literary and cultural context for the collection on view here. What started as the Anschutz Collection became Denver’s American Museum of Western Art in 2010, a stroke creating it as one of the foremost institutions to house a collection of the art of American West. And though that’s a compelling picture, Wildmerding insists it isn’t the complete one:

Through the collection’s concentration on the western story of the nation, we come to see what is distinctive as well as derivative about the region’s art, how it possessed its own vision while belonging to a larger American culture.

Because it is both a massive and luxurious book, the editors have been able to push the idea of “art book” to its widest edge. Examples of art by virtually every important western artist have been included, as well as many, many of the less important ones.

Each image reproduced gives context to a larger picture still as various important time periods in the shaping of the American west are explored, both historically and visually, through the art of that region and/or time. The result is… well, fantastic. Painters and the American West succeeds on virtually every level: art book, visual history and unthinkably heavy calling card for a museum that is one of the best of its kind in the world. ◊


Jones Atwater is a January Magazine contributing editor.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Secret Museum by Molly Oldfield

The title goes quite beyond explaining the book. The Secret Museum: Some Treasures Are Too Precious to Display (Firefly). But the book is about the museum you never see. The objects that are, for various reasons, tucked out of sight, hidden in secret locations and kept from public view.

Author Molly Oldfield tells us that all museums have these things: items too precious, or secret or controversial to be viewed by the steaming masses. “Usually there is more hidden than there is on display,” she writes in The Secret Museum. “There are all sorts of reasons why.”

Items that might be too fragile or too precious or simply too large, as is the case of a blue whale in the National Museum of Scotland at Edinburgh.

At the Royal Geographical Society in London, one will not see Livingstone and Stanley’s hats.

If you go to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm you also won’t see Alfred Nobel’s will (the museum is just too small for the atmospherically controlled display case that would be required to make it possible).

At the Royal Opera House in Kent, England you won’t see Dame Margot Fonteyn’s tutu from when she danced  the role of Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty in 1946. (A madly big deal at the time.)

At the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo you won’t see the logbook of the Kon-Tiki Expedition and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London you won’t see the flag from the battle of Trafalgar.

In total, Oldfield looks closely at 60 items museums are keeping mum about, while mentioning many more. Those who love secrets, museums or just a twisty tale of the entirely true variety will enjoy The Secret Museum. ◊


Aaron Blanton is a contributing editor to January Magazine. He’s currently working on a book based on his experiences as an American living abroad.