Not being much of a hockey fan, I thought for a couple of pages that Cleo Birdwell's "Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League" was the real thing. After all, why not? A woman has played professional football—albeit for only one play—and another has scrimmaged with major-league male basketball players. And there's Cleo Birdwell in a New York Rangers uniform on the back advertisement of "Amazons," looking big and raw-boned and every bit as tough as Anders Hedberg.

But the light began to dawn on me in the first few pages, when James Kinross, president of Madison Square Garden, says to the author: "Tell you the truth, Birdwell, I hate hockey. You don't have a black or Hispanic element. It doesn't reflect the urban reality. Who wants to see two white guys hit each other?"… Besides, I...