I found this book interesting from beginning to end. It is refreshing to read anthropologists and historians who take responsibility for producing culture and not just writing about it. Included in this book are poems, short stories, and essays that defy description (I found the essays more compelling than the fictional writing). The book gave me a deeper understanding of the fieldwork experience itself, since the more flexible styles of writing in the book maintain the tension between the culture the author is writing about and the experience of living within a different culture. Perhaps as we pile up more and more information about other cultures we need to change direction and consider why we write in the first place. This volume gives us one possible direction that social science writing can go in. This type of thing has been done before, and no doubt will be done again, but as I far as I know there are only a few collections available. This is a valuable addition to that list.

I love this book, and refer to it constantly, both in my life and in my books. It has the best first sentence of any book I've ever read: "Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home." And the book takes off from there. It is an extraordinary exploration of the indigenous peoples with whom Diamond worked, and explores the differences between, for example, indigenous and civilized moralities. Here is what he wrote about morality in a civilized world: 'Our moral syntax has no predicate. Hence we speak of doing good, good for its own sake, or evil. We convert each to a pure substantive, beyond experience, abstract. That is what [anthropologist] Paul Radin meant when he observed that the subject (or object) to which love, remorse, sorrow, may be directed is regarded as secondary in our civilization. All have the rank of virtues as such: they are manifestations of God's if not of Man's way. But among primitives . . . the converse holds. Morality is behavior, values are not detached, not substantives; the good, the true, the beautiful or rather, the ideas of these things, do not exist. Therefore, one does not fall in love, one loves another; and that is an intricately learned experience, as hate, in a certain sense, also is.'

The whole book is that good. Fabulous. Fabulous.

This books lists Toronto defeating Montreal in the 1966 Stanley Cup playoffs, 4 games to 2. That must have happened on another planet because Montreal won the series, not Toronto. And it was 4 games to none. I haven't had time to check the rest of the book, but you would think that the author would have double-checked the data and proofread it. This was not a misspelling or transposed digits. I wonder what other errors were overlooked. If you want to be called "The Official Encyclopedia of the Stanley Cup," you have to live up to the name. Let the buyer beware!

I don't know what the reader from Livonia is referring to. Montreal did win the Cup in 1966 4-0. But the very next year Toronto did beat Montreal 4-2 to win it. It seems the reader misread the year, not the author miswriting. I could find no reference to Toronto winning the Cup in '66.

In all I find the book to not be of the quality of Total Hockey by the same publisher (a great buy) but is certainly worthy of purchase. If you're into statistics there's plenty inside.

This is a great publication. It contains all that you could possibly want to know about Lord Stanley's Cup.