Although it took me a while to finish this book, it was wonderful and extremely well written. I enjoyed being able to relate to the number of emotions that were surrounding the games. Throughout the book, you felt like you were apart of the games that were being played and you could feel how each important player felt, it was amazing. I remember just sitting in my room reading and reminiscing about all the good games I have had in football for the past couple of years. There are very few books that I will say this about but this book made me feel like I was living it, I felt a rush of energy as I went through the highs and the lows of the book. I felt alive reading this book. I hope and pray that everyone that has ever felt like one moment in their life has risen to one point and have felt the pain of losing that one moment and then regaining it again with the help, connection, and love of a "team" behind them. Absolutely one of the best-written books I have ever read, sure there are some slow spots but you get past them and really understand how beautiful this book really is and get background and sense before you dive in. I believe this is definitely a must read.

My friends Matt & Cassie introduced us to the television show "Friday Night Lights" this past winter. I had only heard of it on blogs before then and never really paid any attention to it.

Wow, was I late to the party. The television show is excellent and I highly recommend it, even if you don't like football.

Being the bookworm that I am, I had to find the inspiration for the television show. I actually bought a copy of the book for my friend Matt for Christmas and the four of us eventually decided to read the book and have a little book discussion afterwards.

The book is a fast read and is mostly enjoyable. The parts that are not enjoyable are mainly because of the subject matter and now the writing. Reading about the town of Odessa, TX is very difficult because the society there is completely foreign to me. There are times when you want to shake the book and say, "What is WRONG with you?" Many of those moments happened, for me, when there were detailed descriptions of academics being flushed down the tubes in favor of football.

Overall, though, the writing is good. Bissinger can be a bit over the top at times, though. He uses hyperbole and metaphor a bit too much, but he creates a solid image in your mind of what this town, this school, this team is really like. The hard part is accepting the fact that there really is a place like Odessa that has all these problems.

Devastating snapshot of rural America in the 80s. Heartbreaking stuff. Incredibly written. Makes you want to cry for the people and for the nostalgia it conjures up from your own life.

i'm going to make a confession to all of you.

i like sports.

watching them, that is. i'm not a total monster.

i understand if we can no longer be friends.

this is an incredible depiction of sports, of high school, of class, and of race. it's pretty remarkable what it's able to achieve, and it makes it irritating how bad the movie is. (i watched it on a plane out of desperation and it had no idea what its own message was.) (in other words, it's a movie that deserves to be watched on a plane.)

there are 2 things i wish this book was more self-aware about:
1) all players are just kids. this book is so convincing about its own arbitrarily selected team on that front, but its depiction of the cowboys, who go on to defeat our team and are arguably far more deserving by many metrics, is strange. the idea of the underdog or the worthy could have used some more interrogating.
2) the role of the girl of this is so depressing. i am not a reader who can't make it through a male-dominated book without crying sexism, but this found me an exception. girls in this book are cheerleaders, decorations, pep squad members, beggars of attention and sex, and ultimately unmentioned victims. boobie, one of this book's stars, is conveniently located in prison at its end without mention of the cause — which google will tell you is aggravated sexual assault and domestic violence. part of this book mentions the football team's corresponding pep squad, but i wish there were more on what football did to the other half of the town.

anyway. no book can do everything, and in most things this was so considered and accomplished.

just not all.

bottom line: any true lovers of the story have to love sports.

This book is about so much more than American Football. On the surface, it tells the story of the Permian Panthers, the high school football team from Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. It focuses on 6 of the senior players and some of the coaching staff. It gives us accounts of their backgrounds, families and their feelings about school, life and playing football.

The season in question (1988) was supposed to be the year where the team were too good, they were meant to win the state championship. They had the players, they had the coach and they had the fans. Twenty thousand fans who queued a week early to get tickets for the local derby. The fans who took more interest in the high school football team than they did in the drop in oil price that was destroying the city. The fans who worried more about the form of their star running back than they did about the education of their children.

The story is superbly written. The descriptions of the matches are visceral: you really can almost smell the blood, sweat and tears. This contrasts with the sections about foundation of the city and the background of the families and fans. To someone who played sport at school, I found the behaviour of the fans incredible. 20,000 people watched a SCHOOL match - unbelievable

The priorities in some of these schools seem completely crazy as well: More money spent of medical tape for the football team than was spent on the entire school English department; Teachers doctoring grades in order for players to pass and be eligible to play; Football players barely attending classes to concentrate on training. A shocking indictment of how the US school system was set up to favour the few. I'm not sure it is still the same, but I guess that not much has changed.

On the whole, a brilliant book where the characters are engrossing and the story is wonderfully realised

In 1988 Philadelphia sportswriter H.G. Bissinger journeyed to Western Texas to see what was up with the state's winningest high-school football team. He put not only the Permian Panther's football program under his analytical lens, but the entire city of Odessa in West Texas that surrounds it. Mojo -- that shorthand for football support that shows up on everything from newspaper titles to bumper stickers to hand-lettered signs the cheerleading Pepettes placed in their assigned players' front yards -- rules not only the high school but really the whole town, as witness the fact that the only real progress toward racial integration Odessa had seen took place on the Permian football field but nowhere else.

The beauty of this book is that career sportswriter Bissinger moved to Odessa and spent enough time there to write about aspects of its that only a resident would understand: the complex racial situation, the boom-and-bust economic situation, the class resentment against nearby Midland, that tony capitalist enemy yoked to the hardscrabble, laboring Odessa. He can also relate a football game like nobody else, and tell the individual star players' stories in ways that makes sense of their lives to us, if not always to them. New readers should be aware that this book with its warts-and-all reportage is not as upbeat as the movie with Billy Bob Thornton, nor nearly as breezy as the prime-time soap opera NBC made of it.

There is, however, a good book to pair off with this one for those who wish to go even deeper beneath the surface of another community's high-school football team: Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb by Bernard Lefkowitz. Together they are anything but sunny, but they are both immensely readable and tell some hard truths about the underside of high-school athleticism as exemplified in its most celebrated players -- the football team.

Spectacular Story

Was an amazing story about a high school football town and high school football team. It really goes deep into what it means to be a high school player and team in a small Texas town.

It may be one of the finest books I’ve ever read and I highly recommend it to you not for the football but for the people.

I didn't grow up in a football-watching family. My father, who apparently loved the game, passed away when I was young. My mother was much more interested in baseball, and had coworkers with season tickets, so I grew up going to the Kingdome to watch Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Joey Cora, Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner, Dan Wilson... I even spent my high school prom night at Safeco Field, watching Freddy Garcia pitch a great game against the Yankees (who he'd eventually join, years later, sigh) instead of going to the dance. My high school football team certainly wasn't any good, and had I'd known that my college football team (Hofstra) would eventually a) have so many pro-level players, and b) get entirely nixed a few years after I'd graduated, I might've gone to more than one game. Maybe.

I came to football late in life, and have grown to love the game for any number of reasons. My knowledge of football certainly has a ways to go, still, but I do admit to being a total sucker for player stories and backgrounds - it's part of the reason why I fell in love with the Seahawks when Pete Carroll and John Schneider came along and shook things up - they found themselves a bunch of guys who were hungry to prove themselves, who'd been told over the course of their careers that they weren't good enough. If you saw this year's Super Bowl, you know how that worked out.

I say all of this because while I love football now, if you'd have told me a few years ago that I'd fall so in love with a book about football, I probably would not have believed you. But the thing is that the television show version of "Friday Night Lights" has a lot to do with why I opened my eyes to football to begin with, because much like Friday Night Lights the book - it's about so much more than football.

Friday Night Lights takes place in Odessa in the '80s, which becomes its own sort of character - an oil-boom town that never quite recovered from the bust, full of people living it up, thinking they were invincible... but then that whole business in the middle east was sorted out, and gas prices dropped off, and millionaires and banks in Texas found themselves broke.

Odessa was also dealing with its own particularly stagnant brand of race relations in the '80s, so much so that they had segregated schools for so long that eventually the government came in and said, "No, really, you can't do this anymore." But of course, once they realized that Black people were good at football, they were far more accepting, and drew town lines based on what demographic of people lived where (so that Permian could get more Black people). Yikes.

Most of all, Friday Night Lights is about the team and the coaches of Permian - the character traits and flaws that brought them failure and success, the single moments in games that came to define them, the dreams they held of greatness and the reality of life post-football, the toxicity of being held on a pedestal at such a young age contrasted with the question of, if they hadn't had football to be great for, then what?

Even though I totally understand why Bissinger uses the distinguished H.G. at the front of his name, a part of me wished he used his nick-name, "Buzz," because it perfectly describes his prose. His writing is just teeming with energy, with life, like the humming of a street light or a telephone wire. Bissinger shines when he's writing about people - their hands, the way that they eat, the look in their eye - you feel as though you've met them before.

I also was a bit sad by the fact that the most recent time I remember Bissinger being in the news was when he wrote about his shopping addiction - it made for a rather depressing juxtaposition when he was writing about issues of class and economics in Friday Night Lights so gut-wrenchingly well. At the same time, though, there's clearly something in him that deeply identifies with some of the bigger picture issues here - the striving for something seemingly greater, wanting to fill some kind of void. If he uses designer suits instead of football, I suppose that's just his poison of choice.

Whether your interest in the sport falls at zero or 100%, Friday Night Lights is an incredible look at the role that sports play in a community - the good and the bad - and an incredible study of Odessa, the '80s, the educational system, high school kids... so much more than just football - but plenty of that, too.

Update, Oct. 28: Continuing my "watching the movies of the books I've read this year" project, as I'm also a big film lover, I watched the movie adaptation of this, though I'd seen it before. The main problem is that this book is about so many things - the history of the town, the lives of the people in it, and obviously, football. To distill the book to just the football portions is to miss a lot of the point - which is by no means the movie's fault, since that's the most adaptable aspect. But, having read the book, I can see why making the film was not totally satisfying for Berg, and why he went on to make a TV show about it - there's just too much under the surface to get into during a two-hour film. The movie is much more faithful to the book than the TV series, which is more "inspired by" the people and the place as it is loyal to the story of anything that actually happened. Still, even though it's not connected to the story in the book at all really, the TV show does capture the same spirit, the idea that football is what gives this run-down town a purpose and a dream, what gives these people hope and possibly a chance to escape, or at least gives them glory days to wax poetic about when they've put away a six-pack...

What a ride - can’t believe all the hopefulness and devastation I felt about FOOTBALL. But it’s not just about football; this is a sociological text exploring gender, race, and class in a depressed Texas town. It’s an ethnography of Odessa, a town with a wild, outlaw streak and a singular industry. It’s about the boom and bust of the oil industry and what that does to the town’s psyche. It’s about a place whose residents place all of their hopes and dreams onto teenagers playing a brutal, gladiator sport that chews them up and spits them out.

I’m going to be thinking about these boys for a long, long time. Especially Booby Miles, a Black athlete who was expendable to the white coaching staff (and town) once he injured his knee and didn’t have the speed that he used to. His story was tragic, unforgettable and encapsulates the danger of prioritizing athleticism over all else. Not that he was presented with many other choices

Pubblicato in Italia da poco, a distanza di trenta anni dalla sua prima edizione americans.

Eppure...

Eppure lo si inizia a leggere e non lo si molla più.
È più di un libro, è più di un reportage, è piu della storia di una stagione di football.
È la descrizione di una passione totale, nel bene e nel male.
Con alcuni passaggi di vera letteratura.

An incredibly compelling book that uses high school football as an entry point to portray American life in the late 80s. The observations on American culture, economics, politics and public education are largely still relevant. At times it brought me near tears and it’s hard not to come away with the feeling that we absolutely should not be putting kids through this.

"Life really wouldn't be worth livin' if you didn't have a high school team to support."
In the Reading class I am teaching in May 2016, I challenged my students to read a book from a genre they had not read. I played along, and ended up reading an Amish romance and this sports book. One reading friend talked about this book on an episode of the Reading Envy podcast and made it sound pretty compelling, sports or no sports.

"You'd watch these kids play, and it seem like somethin' burning would be inside of you and want to come out."

And it is compelling. Enough that they made a movie and a television show based on the book (neither of which I've seen.) It isn't just about football, but about social order, small town culture, racism, new money, the education system, conservatism, etc. I freely admit that I read the non-sportsing parts more closely than any play by play scenes (of which there were few, thankfully.)

"We fit as athletes, but we really don't fit as a part of society... We know that we're separate, until we get on the field. We know that we're equal as athletes. But once we get off the field we're not equal. When it comes time to play the game, we are a part of it. But after the game, we are not a part of it." (black coach at Permian, 1988)

Has this made me want to read more sports books? Well maybe. If they are actually about something else. :)