Friday Night Lights

Author:

By H.G. Bissinger

Format:

Paperback

Availability:

In print, usually dispatched within 48 hours.

Price:

£8.99 £8.09 (Save 10%)

Tagged with:

American Football, High School Football, Reflections on the Game, Permian Panthers

Member Reviews

• Reviewed by 1 member with an average rating of 5 out of 5 stars. Login or join us to post the first review!

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Further Details

• Published: 28th Apr 2005
• ISBN: 0224076744
• Pages: 416

From Word of Sport:

Bissinger's astonishing and gripping portrait of high school football in a small West Texas town. Odessa follows its Permian Panthers with a passionate and single-minded devotion; this chronicle of their 1988 season reveals how the emotional investment in the team inspires (or shatters) the teenagers who play for them. Ultimately horrifying.

This is a quite wonderful book. It has now spawned a film and numerous other imitators, but this remains the one to read. It'll be on most people's all time best lists and quite rightly so - an absolute classic. Read and enjoy.

From the Publisher:

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, dreamed and cheered 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 in total. 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.

Member Reviews and Ratings

James (Blogger)

Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

Perhaps the most famous book ever written about the sport, Friday Night Lights is a book about dreams, passion and the hard realities of Football. Briliantly written by Bissinger, this book takes the reader right into the sometimes maddening world of Texas High School Football. It has even more impact because it's true. Read it!

The film starring Billy Bob Thornton is an excellent adaptation, with a few interesting cameos; Boobie Miles plays an assistant coach and can be seen standing next to actor derek Luke (playing Boobie) in the half time locker room scene.

Posted on 15th Dec 2006 at 23:10:34 GMT.