From Toronto to China, Dubai to Transylvania and back, a hilarious, moving account of one man's quest for "pure hockey."

On a hot summer's day in 1998, when Dave Bidini found himself watching Martha Stewart rather than the Stanley Cup playoffs, he knew that something was seriously amiss: The game he loved had crossed the line. It was now an entertainment, not a sport. A passionate hockey fan and rec player, Bidini immediately resolved to follow Canada's best export to the rest of the world, to find out whether the true game still existed elsewhere.

His quest took him to a rink on the eighth floor of a shopping mall in Hong Kong; to the gritty city of Harbin in Northern China, where a game much like hockey has been played for six hundred years; to Dubai in the desert of The United Arab Emirates, where hockey is brand-new and incredulous Bedouin drop by the Al Ain rink to wonder at the ice; and to Transylvania, where the game was introduced in the 1920s by a ten-second newsreel of Canadians chasing after a puck, and where it is now played as a vicarious war between Romanians and ethnic Hungarians. In Tropic of Hockey, Bidini weaves hilarious stories of encounters with rinks and players of wildly different talents and experiences with tales of his travels and spot-on observations about the game and players. (6 x 9, 320 pages, b&w photos)