Product Description

In the state of Texas American football is a religion. And nowhere is more fanatical about its football than the small town of Odessa. There, every Friday night from September to November, a bunch of seventeen-year-old kids play their hearts out for the honour of their high school. In front of 20,000 people. In 1988 H.G. Bissinger spent a season in Odessa discovering just what makes a town pin its hopes on eleven boys on a football field. He lived with the students, coaches and townspeople who dedicate their lives to their team, sharing their joys and triumphs, their pains, injuries and bitter disappointments. He returned with a compassionate but hard-eyed story of a town riven by money, race and class, where a high school can spend more on medical supplies for its athletic program than on its English department. Friday Night Lights is one of the best books about sport ever written. It is the story of how dreams and reality collide, at once glorious and immensely sad. Because for the 30-odd boys of the Permian Panthers, these days will have been the best of their lives.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10725 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
Superb and disturbing - More than a sports book, it's a search for the America of ordinary people.', Newsday .'A remarkable book, fascinating from start to finish, full of surprises.', David Halberstam .'Friday Night Lights offers a biting indictment of the sports craziness that grips ... most of American society, while at the same time providing a moving evocation of its powerful allure.', New York Times Book Review .'Just about everything you could ask for in a sports book', New York Times

From the Publisher
A classic of sportswriting - about a season spent following a town and a team's hopes and shattered dreams - and now a major Hollywood film

About the Author
H.G. Bissinger has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the National Headliner Award, and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel for his reporting. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He lives in Philadelphia

Customer Reviews

FASCINATING BUT DEPRESSING
H.G. Bissinger's account of the fortunes of a high school football team during the 1988 season is a genuinely unsettling exploration of the dominant role that sports occupies in American culture. As abrasive and uncompromising as the empty west Texas prairie that surrounds it, the racially and economically-divided oil town of Odessa is a community in decline. The Permian Panthers football team, the most successful high school team in state history, is the only stable feature around which the town, bankrupted by the boom-bust oil economy of the eighties, can base any sense of identity. Such is the unbelievable extent of the town's obsession with the team, that one often forgets that the players Bissinger writes about are not seasoned professionals or even highly-touted college stars, but 17- and 18-year old high school kids. The pampered treatment that the players receive at school and from the community is disquieting, and it becomes clear that without Permian football, the people of Odessa would have nothing with which to give their lives structure and meaning. In this way, Friday Night Lights examines the relationship between a sports team and a community that occupies such an intriguing and integral role in the American identity. Bissinger's observations moreover highlight the disturbing inadequacies of an education system continually relegated to second place behind athletic success. A fascinating, if ultimately depressing book, that is as much an indictment of life in the heartland of Reagan-era America as it is of the more general nationwide obsession with sports.

Even if you didn't play high school football, READ THIS BOOK
As a three year member and starter of the varsity squad of my High School in Chesapeake Virginia, the stories from this book were all too familiar. The small Virginia town in which I played was similiar to that of Odessa, Canton, Penn Hills, and others across the country where High School football is the main focus of attention and entertainment. This book made me think back to all of the great times I had, the great friends I made, and the many memories that I will never forget. Bissinger brought out the many "behind the scenes" views of the sport. All the problems and events that happen in the Permian locker room, coaches office, halls, classrooms, and in the lives of the players, occur everyday in schools everywhere.

On the bus ride home from the very last game of my senior year..a tough last minute loss, giving our school its first losing record in 25 years at 4-6. I thought about the two state championships we won in the two years before, and why it had to end like it did, and I thought about the blood, sweat, and tears that we have all spilled on the playing fields. As we pulled away I realized that I'd probably never step onto a football field to play again and that these days are now behind me forever. Then, like so many of the seniors on the bus with me, and the thousands more around the country...I cried.

I sometimes forget why I played football in high school. Three years after my final game I bought this book and read it. It then became all clear to me, and I recalled why I played. I laughed a little, and maybe even cried a little, and you will too.

Searing
FRINDAY NIGHT LIGHTS is a deeply disturbing book. It deserves a wide audience. While outwardly, football is the focus of the book, the books delivers a devastating critique not only of false dreams and hopes, but of class and racial devides. As I was reading FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, I could not help comparing Odessa Permian with "Laketown High School"(Yorktown, West Chester NY), as portrayed in Richard Woodley's magnificent TEAM: A HIGH SCHOOL ODYSSEY (published in the early 1970s, and out of print). Like Bissinger, Woodley the journalist spent his time with "Laketown" football team. The contrast between Odessa and "Laketown" could not be more different. The difference? One can start off by the leadership and teaching roles of the two head coaches. The other factors, of course, is the role of football plays in various communities. Two weeks ago (August 1999), I drove by Odessa (it was hot and dusty) on my way back from San Diego, and I was reminded of the characters portrayed in the book: Boobie Miles (what are you doing now, Boobie?), the earnest QB with the wobbly pass, and the TE who went to Harvard.