Because for the 30-odd boys of the Permian Panthers, these days will have been the best of their lives. It is the story of how dreams and reality collide, at once glorious and immensely sad. 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.įriday Night Lights is one of the best books about sport ever written. Bissinger chronicles a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspiresand sometimes shattersthe teenagers who wear the Panthers’ uniforms. 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. With frankness and compassion, empathy and brutal honesty, H. Bissinger spent a season in Odessa discovering just what makes a town pin its hopes on eleven boys on a football field. 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. And nowhere is more fanatical about its football than the small town of Odessa. In the state of Texas American football is a religion.
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