Book 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.
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 the author of the highly acclaimed
A
Prayer for the City
, and is a contributing editor at
Vanity Fair
. He lives in Philadelphia.
