Quick Take
- Narration: Ken Dryden reads his own account of the 1972 Summit Series with a goalie’s quiet authority, his voice carrying the weight of someone who was on the ice and has spent fifty years understanding what it meant.
- Themes: National identity through sport, Cold War competition, hockey as history
- Mood: Reverent and urgent, with the present-tense prose creating a sense of suspended stakes
- Verdict: Essential listening for anyone with a stake in Canadian hockey history, though the short runtime will leave you wanting a much longer book.
My grandfather talked about the 1972 Summit Series the way people talk about where they were when something enormous happened. He remembered the time zones, the arguments at work about whether Canada could pull it off, the afternoon of Game Eight when he and sixteen million other Canadians stopped whatever they were doing. I grew up with that story as mythology. Listening to Ken Dryden tell it from the inside, in his own voice, felt like a different kind of access entirely.
The Series is Dryden’s celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of those eight games between Canada and the Soviet Union, and it approaches the material with what he describes as a you-are-there style: writing as if he is living the experience for the first time, pulling the reader into each game with present-tense immediacy. The result is structurally interesting, because Dryden was there. He was one of the Canadian goalies. He knows how it ends, and yet the prose insists on the uncertainty of each moment, the genuine possibility that it could have gone differently. That tension between retrospective knowledge and artificial present-tense suspense is the formal bet the book makes, and Dryden largely wins it.
The Goalie’s Particular Understanding
What Dryden brings to this that no journalist or historian could replicate is the specificity of athletic memory. He describes the Soviet players not as opponents in a Cold War abstraction but as specific individuals with specific tendencies, specific ways of moving and thinking on ice. He writes about Tretiak, the Soviet goalie, with the particular attention one goalie gives another, understanding his preparation and his composure in ways that an outside observer would not catch. This is the book’s most distinctive quality: history seen from the crease.
Dryden has also argued for decades that the 1972 series changed hockey permanently, not just on the ice but in how the sport understood itself globally. He makes that case here with the confidence of someone who watched it happen in real time. The Canadian players went in expecting to win easily and discovered that the Soviets had developed a style of play that was technically superior in several respects. That shock of recognition, and the adaptation it forced, is Dryden’s thesis about why the series matters beyond the scoreline.
The Problem of the Runtime
Reviewer Lepardo’s two-star review raises the most legitimate criticism of this audiobook: at two hours and eight minutes, it is genuinely short. Dryden is one of the great writers in hockey literature, the author of The Game, which remains one of the finest sports books written in any genre. The Series, by comparison, is a pamphlet. Reviewer Greg Askew praises Dryden’s perspective as a player, and reviewer Emmanuel identifies Dryden as a lifelong hero, but both responses point to the same underlying truth: this is a book that readers come to with enormous appetite, and the runtime leaves that appetite only partially satisfied.
Dryden writes, as he always does, with a historian’s gravity and a player’s intimacy, and those two qualities sit together in his narration with unusual ease. The reading is unhurried, precise, occasionally luminous in the way his prose can be. But the short form means that many things are gestured toward rather than explored. The book is more tribute than analysis, more evocation than argument. Whether that is enough depends on what you bring to it and how much of the mythology you already carry.
The Audience This Was Made For
For Canadian hockey listeners of a certain age, or anyone who has grown up hearing about Game Eight as a defining national event, The Series is an hour of genuine pleasure and some genuine frustration. The pleasure comes from Dryden’s prose and his insider perspective. The frustration comes from knowing that he could write the full, long, comprehensive account of those eight games and has not yet done so. This book is the shorter companion volume that makes you want the bigger one. If it brings new listeners to The Game or to his earlier writing on the series, it will have done its work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to know hockey to appreciate The Series, or is it accessible to casual sports readers?
Dryden writes with enough contextual explanation that a general reader can follow, but the emotional depth of the book is most available to listeners who already carry some sense of what the 1972 Summit Series meant to Canada.
How does Ken Dryden’s self-narration work given that he is a professional writer but not a trained voice actor?
He reads with the calm authority that characterizes his prose, unhurried and precise. His delivery suits the material, and the fact that he was present for the events he describes gives the narration a weight no hired narrator could match.
Is The Series a good starting point for Dryden’s writing, or should listeners read The Game first?
The Game is widely regarded as his masterwork and is probably the better starting point. The Series is best understood as a companion piece celebrating a specific anniversary, and readers who already love his writing will get more from it.
At just over two hours, does The Series cover all eight games of the 1972 Summit Series?
It covers the series but not in exhaustive game-by-game detail. The short runtime means the approach is impressionistic rather than comprehensive, using the present-tense you-are-there style to evoke the series rather than document it fully.
