Home
/
Non-Fiction
/
Friday Night Lights
Friday Night Lights
Oct 8, 2024 6:35 AM

Author:H G Bissinger

Friday Night Lights

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.

Reviews

Superb and disturbing - More than a sports book, it's a search for the America of ordinary people.

—— Newsday

A remarkable book, fascinating from start to finish, full of surprises.

—— David Halberstam

Friday Night Lights offers a biting indictment of the sports craziness that grips ... most of American society, while at the same time providing a moving evocation of its powerful allure.

—— New York Times Book Review

Just about everything you could ask for in a sports book

—— New York Times

Michael writes about disaster, humiliation, rejection and ridicule - the hilarious truth

—— Nicholas Hytner

Brilliantly witty

—— Ed Smith , Daily Mail

It is wonderfully written - full of wit, gags, self-deprecating asides and a pure, unfettered understanding of a man's limitations - and it talks to all of us. You should buy it. You really should go out straight away and pick up a copy. It'll make you feel so much better

—— All Out Cricket

At last the work of genius that will finally bring the long-suffering cricket addict a measure of understanding in the world. A wonderful and very funny book

—— Sir Tim Rice

You read the wonderful Michael Simkins with a mixture of horror and delight

—— David Hare

One of Britain's funniest writers

—— Daily Mail

Extremely funny - whether or not you know your bails from your balls

—— Daily Mail

One of the funniest sporting memoirs ever

—— Sunday Telegraph

Almost painfully funny

—— Observer

An all-too honest account of a playing career that just got better and better, despite threatening to go off the rails.

—— Sunday Mercury

An extraordinary book.

—— Irish Independent

Harrowing and brutally honest...a gripping story.

—— Derby Evening Telegraph

Brutally honest.

—— The Irish Post

Less a football autobiography, more repentant confessional.

—— Kevin Hughes , FreeSport

stunning

—— FourFourTwo
Comments
Welcome to zzdbook comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.zzdbook.com All Rights Reserved