I really enjoyed the book—it was much more than just the story of a single football season with the exciting game-by-game play-by-play recaps. Quite central to the book was the very evident issue of race and racial tension of those various times and places. The Permian Panthers team colors of Black & White were poignant. But the book covered so well so much more, including the history of that West Texas area, the socio-economics of the oil and banking industries of that time, the politics of the time (both local and the ’88 presidential race), the state education system, and it put me right there in high school in 1988. I really enjoyed the book.

It's not a surprise that I loved this book. It is about high school football.

I watched a lot of football growing up (Friday nights: high school football; Saturday: University of Colorado football; Sunday: NFL football - I was a huge 49ers fan). I probably could have done something great with all the hours I spent watching football. Ah well.

My high school football team won the state championship, and I remember it as a glory day - it was snowing, the team was playing in then-Folsom Field (the University of Colorado football field). I had rushed back from Denver to see the game, having taken only 2 out of a possible 3 standardized subject tests (now called the SAT2?) so that I could get back in time for the game.

Because of this book (which I first read about 8 or 9 years ago), I watched the FNL TV series, which is my favorite TV series (with the caveat that I don't really watch TV outside of HGTV and ESPN). Then I named my son Dylan, and I think I've mentioned elsewhere that it didn't hurt that his name was a phonetic homage to Dillon, Texas, the fictional town where the FNL show takes place...

Anyway. I argue that, even if you are not a sports fan, you will be riveted. Those in my book club, all women, half of whom had no interest in football, all enjoyed it (although some confessed they skipped the play-by-play descriptions of the games in the book).

This book clearly lays out the cultural and social context in which high school football was revered over all else. Odessa was in a downturn in the oil boom-and-bust cycle. Odessa schools didn't racially integrate until the 1980s (Brown v Board of Education was decided in 1954), and then there was football-motivated gerrymandering of school lines, effectively sending most of the African-American running backs to Permian High rather than to its rival crosstown high school. Unemployment was high. All this was forgotten under the lights of a Friday night if the Permian Panthers won before 20,000 people whose greatest hopes and dreams rested on a bunch of 15- to 18-year-olds.

To be on the Permian Panthers football team (at least in the 80s, when this was written) was to be king. For girls, the next-best thing was to date a football player or be a Pepette - the personal cheerleader of a designated football player - to bring him homemade cookies before games and put banners on his front lawn with his jersey number. The Panthers coach was God if he won the game that Friday night. If the team lost, he knew he could count on having "For Sale" signs put into his front lawn. If the team lost twice in a season, he would not be surprised to lose his job. Eighth graders who hoped to play for the Panthers some day would be lauded for playing through their league games with a broken arm.

At a rival high school, teachers would slip football players the answers to the exams so that they could maintain the minimum GPA required to play football. Several of these players, having secured college football scholarships, then decided to go into armed robbery. Having been raised to believe that consequences did not apply to them, they were honestly shocked when the judge sentenced them to lengthy prison terms.

High school football in Texas is life. If that seems crazy to you, you may be persuaded otherwise after reading this book.

If you think this book is about high school football in Texas, you're pretty much wrong. There is a fair amount about football, but this book is really a sort of sociological study of a small Texas town where Football is played. There is a lot about the difficulties of the local economy after the oil slump, and in general the book gives what I thought was a fairly negative view of the people and their preoccupations.

I almost never like movies better than books, but in this case I thought the movie did a really excellent job of cutting out the boring parts of the book and of bringing out the good qualities and the passion of the locals instead of focusing more on negatives.

High School Football in Texas is completely different than anywhere else in America. Friday Night Lights gives you the perfect example of how serious they take football, and what high school football in Texas is all about. I would compare this book to many other high school football books, and would recommend this book to anyone who likes football.

I liked this book because of the suspense leading up to the playoff's. As silly as it seemed to have the teams to ake the playoff's determined with a coin flip, that just added so much suspense and really kept me glued to the book. I love sports books, and this was a perfect example of a good sports book, i recommend this book for any sports fan/player.

When this book initially appeared, the author, Philadelphia newspaper editor H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger, gave an interview in which he described how he developed the idea for the book. He said he had been on a nighttime flight over America's heartland, saw an occasional light twinkling below, as isolated from him as if it was on Mars, and wondered who lived down there and what their lives were like. He eventually settled on writing a story about the Permian Panthers, a high school football team from the football-mad town of Odessa, Texas.

It seemed noteworthy to me that Bissinger so unapologetically viewed Odessa and places like it as mere flyover country, and its residents as mysterious beings who might as well have been aliens from outer space. Bissinger did not seem like the right person to tell their story.

Re-reading the book confirmed these impressions even more strongly than did my first experience with it. Not only was Bissinger a stranger to West Texas, but more importantly its residents - at least those who were white - were completely beyond his moral imagination. As a result, he relentlessly portrayed Odessans as racist, though usually without attribution, perhaps because of concerns about libel lawsuits. He also pictured them as cartoonishly Republican, Christian, and capitalist, which to Bissinger was probably pretty much the same thing as calling them racist. The result is that the reader learns a lot more about Buzz Bissinger than about anyone who lived in Odessa in 1988, and it's not a pretty sight.

The saddest thing is that in the right hands, this story offered rich material for a writer. The obsession with high school football in Texas mixes the good, the bad, and the crazy together in a crazy-quilt pattern. People generally are hard-working, honest, and successful, but yes, priorities can become distorted. Yes, some unconstructed racists may persist, but they were rare even in 1988, and surpassingly rare now. . The creative destruction of capitalism can result in instability and insecurity, especially in places with a natural boom-bust economy like West Texas, but that doesn't mean people who want to work for a living are chumps who don't know their own best interest. And much of the school failure and social breakdown among racial minorities described by Bissinger actually is caused by the failed social nostrums favored by Bissinger, not any vestigial discrimination against those persons.

Bissinger also fell back on lazy cliches and stereotypes, mixing and matching them without giving a thought to the contradictions. For example, Bissinger described Odessa as economically devastated by the drop in oil prices that began early in the Reagan years, filled with gigantic boneyards full of rusting oilfield equipment and offering no hope for its downtrodden residents. Bissinger also described Odessa as a stereotypical upper middle-class suburb, with a shining new shopping mall and a high school where most students owned their own cars and wore expensive outfits to school. The sense I got was that Bissinger disliked Odessa and couldn't get his mind around the fact that decent people might want to live there, and therefore applied negative stereotypes to it in a slapdash fashion. Obviously, pockets of distress, affluence, and everything in between can appear in the same community, but the weave between those elements is much more subtle and intricate than Bissinger acknowledged.

Another example concerns Carter High School, the talent-laden team from Dallas which beat Permian in the state semi-finals. Carter's student body was almost all black and Bissinger described the school in stereotypical terms of ghetto failure and community leaders convinced that white outsiders were out to get them. At the same time, Carter also was described as a never-ending fashion show with expensive cars in the parking lot. All of these elements may have existed together, but once again the quilt undoubtedly was more complex and individualized than Bissinger acknowledged, or perhaps even saw.

After the football season, several of Carter's uber-talented athletes started pulling off armed robberies of convenience stores and video-rental places, apparently as a way of relieving the tedium until they departed for the colleges that had awarded them scholarships, not because they actually needed anything. Eventually they were caught and, since they had turned 18, received long prison sentences. The most striking detail was that the player who drove the getaway car used his mother's BMW for the job. I'm not quite sure what this story tells us about the state of black America in 1988, or even that slice of it which Bissinger wrote about, but since Bissinger made race one of his primary themes, it is disappointing that he did not seek to delve beneath the surface.

In the right hands - those of a writer who sincerely sought to understand and empathize with the residents of Odessa, and was able to do so, while still remaining alert to the complexities that exist even in a small town and the sometimes garish and even destructive overemphasis Texans place on high school football - Friday Night Lights could have been a wonderful and insightful story. Unfortunately, Buzz Bissinger was not that writer.

Postcript: football fans may recognize a few names in the story: Odell Beckham, the star running back for one of Permian's opponents whose son, Odell Beckham Jr., became a star NFL wide receiver who currently plays for the Cleveland Browns, and Stony Case, the quarterback who ascended to the starting position for Permian the next season, and who later became a rag-armed but highly successful college qb at the University of New Mexico and even had a cup of coffee in the pros despite his lack of the physical attributes needed for the position.

I think a theme could Do the best you can every day because the town Permian was going through some rough times such as the crime rate which has gone up. Also they were going through rough economy times because they are a poor town. But the football team is good and made it all the state semi-finals and worked so hard to get there and lost on the last play of the game. Those players did everything they could to be there they were by doing their best every day and it paid off.

Hace mucho, cuando me enganché a Friday Night Lights, me quedé con la curiosidad de leer la obra que había inspirado la serie. Este año, al fin le he dado una oportunidad.

Es una lectura muy de nicho, ya que es un estudio sociológico realizado en un pequeño pueblo americano que profundiza en la importancia del fútbol americano en la vida de todos y cada uno de los habitantes del mismo.

Como puntos fuertes diría que es bastante curioso ver cómo un deporte puede influir y condicionar el día a día de miles de personas, sobre todo sabiendo que no es a nivel profesional, sino que es a nivel de chicos de instituto.

Algunos capítulos se me han hecho bastante lentos y aunque son necesarios para entender el contexto en el cual transcurre la trama, creo que podrían haber tenido más ritmo.

En resumen, una americanada total que te sirve para entender un poco mejor la mentalidad de estos pueblos que inspiran series como la ya mencionada o como Last Chance U.

Now I know why this book is so successful.

This is a good example of a reporter having good people skills and really putting in the time to get something right. And then have the writing chops to put it all together.

I think reading this book now, in this era (circa 2022), is still relevant. Whether we like it or not, we are still living in the same world. Even if we now have smartphones and Silicon Valley.

Clear eyes full hearts

"Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and A Dream"
By H.G. Bissinger

Before I knew of the book, I knew of the TV show, which itself grew out of the film adaptation. And I knew it was about high school football in the heart of Texas where football and religion were one and the same. I don't count myself as a fan of sports movies but I do watch them from time to time, but you won't find me actively searching for one. So it went with "Friday Night Lights". The film adaption came and went in theaters and I thought nothing of it. The same went for its DVD release. And pretty much the same thing happened for the first season of the TV series. But slowly I started to hear things about the franchise, especially the TV series. One of the things I heard was that the TV series expanded on the themes and ideals that were explored in both the film and the book.

And before I knew it, within a month's span, I picked up the first season of the TV series, the DVD of the film, and with luck on my side I found a copy of the book at the bargain bin center of the bookstore. I watched the film and the plight of the Permian Panther's bid for the 1988 Texas State Championships and for a brief moment realized the intensity that came with the game. But two hours was just not enough. I wanted more. So I went to the TV series and devoured it up. It touched on many things that movie danced around and by the time I finished the season, I decided I had to read the original source material that started it all.

It's the middle of March now and I remember starting the book at the start the year. I had watched the movie back around November and I wasn't sure if I would remember the characters but sure enough I soon did. Before long, names such as Boobie Miles, Mike Winchell, Billingsley, Chavez, and Coach Gary Gaines lived in my mind as I read the book. Though I knew of what was going to come because of the movie, what I didn't account for was the wealth of information that H.G. Bissinger had incorporated in the book. There were histories towns, people, racism, and the Permian Panthers themselves. This book was not simply about football in West Texas but it is rather a bigger picture at a slice of life in this section of America.

In some ways Texas is a microcosm of the nation. Both Texas and the nation went from boom to bust in the Eighties during the time of 'big oil'. Racism was as much as a hotly debated topic of concern as it is for the nation. Football itself for the area has strong ties to racism and town histories and state championships.

But it's the concentrated concern of the high school football athletes that's always front and center. Just as most of the world seems concentrated at the years of high school and college, it is this sentiment seen at its height and ugliness with high school football. Boys have been brought up with the desire to play football and go all the way. Just like ancient gladiators or Spartans or Romans, do they fight with all their might on the field. The towns cheer for them. The towns cheat for them. The towns fight for them. The towns live through them. And all this comes to a head on a single day, on a single night: Friday nights.

- Michael Midnight

Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger is a adventure. There are many ups and downs in the book. But overall, I think the book is good. If your a football player, you can really relate to this book. It's about a football team in the very small town of Odessa, TX. This non-fiction book takes place in the 1980’s. The book talks about the history of the town, but most importantly what keeps the town alive. Which is the Permian Panthers high school football team. Every friday night like many other high schools, there is a football game. But this isn’t just an ordinary small town friday night football game. The whole town of Odessa comes to every single game. The stadium is always filled with about 19,000 residents/fans. Just the way the book describes how being at the Ratliff stadium on a friday night feels like. The book also describes basically almost every single players life story on the 1988 Permian Panthers football team. All around, I think sporty people would love this book. Only because they can relate to this. But it doesn’t matter who reads it because either way it’s a fantastic book to read.