From Behind the Red Line: An American Hockey Player in Russia

One expects that a more adult Hartje will come to regret this memoir, for although he has a unique tale to relate, most of it is told with whining self-absorption and condescension. In 1990, just out of Harvard and drafted by the Canadian Winnipeg Jets hockey team, he was given the opportunity to spend a season in Ukraine with Sokol Kiev on an exchange program, the first North American to play on a pro hockey team there. Having done no background reading or language study, Hartje suffered culture shock and was surprised to find that conditions at the Sokol camp were a far cry from the cossetting jocks receive at home. His teammates and their families, on their part, took to him with affection, however, and by season's end Hartje is able to reciprocate: ``Country crazy. But people, big hearts.'' The book, written with Canadian journalist Martin, reeks with school-boy expletives, but we're told interesting things about Soviet hockey--they may play ``a swifter, cleaner, purer game, hockey ballet-style'' but under the authoritarian sports system ``spirit was sucked out'' of the skaters. And it's eerie to learn that the two preeminent hockey teams since 1946 are the KGB's Dynamo Moscow and the military's Red Army. (May)