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Loading... Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, A Dream (original 1990; edition 2004)by H. G. Bissinger (Author)
Work InformationFriday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by Buzz Bissinger (1990)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I really don't know football at all, and I think that prevented me a bit from enjoying this book as much as other people. For one thing, I really didn't get a handle on all of the different players (only Boobie stuck out) and my eyes glazed over when Bissinger would do a play-by-play of the games. But this is a powerful book about adolescence and the allure and psychic dangers of sports and putting people on a pedestal. PAP II Summer Reading: As with Into the Wild, I did put this one off, too, for nearly three months, and it was the one I finished within twelve hours of the first day of school. Unlike Into the Wild, I find very little redeemable about this book, which I continued to look for a thread of light in (even as a mismanaged sports metaphor for the urban superhero), but I found myself in a depressing dirge that told tack by tack exactly why high school football should be removed from ruining children's lives. I can easily piece together how we'll use it to discuss identity, conformity, and individualism, but just as much I'm counting down to returning it to Amazon in exchange for a completely different book, and thanking my stars that Audible does that. no reviews | add a review
Has the adaptationIs abridged in
Sports & Recreations.
Nonfiction.
Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business. In bad times, the unemployment rate barrels out of control; in good times, its murder rate skyrockets. But every Friday night from September to December, when the Permian High School Panthers play football, this West Texas town becomes a place where dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, H. G. Bissinger chronicles a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires--and sometimes shatters--the teenagers who wear the Panthers' uniforms. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)796.332The arts Recreational and performing arts Athletic and outdoor sports and games Ball sports Inflated ball driven by the foot American footballLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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That enormity of public emotional investment into the team has real ramifications for the people who make it up: the coach and his family, of course, but also the players. The coach (only very vaguely reminiscent of the beloved Coach Taylor) is at least a well-compensated professional, but the players are just teenagers. You can see the loose outlines of some of the characters who would make up the core of the show: the hot-shot, big-talking running back, the reserved, wary quarterback, the trouble-making, fast-living halfback. But the players themselves are kind of inconsequential: they are merely the bodies inside the uniforms that have such symbolic meaning. It's Permian that the crowd roots for year after year, even as the names on the jerseys come and go.
Reading this after seeing the show is the opposite of the usual reaction: the screen adaptation is so rich and beautifully realized that the book has a hard time living up to the comparison. Part of that is because they're telling similar stories in two very different ways. The book is more interested in looking at the broader social picture and the way that team fits into that picture as a whole, and only then in its component parts, while the show takes the opposite storytelling tack and focuses on the people and their relationships making up the team, filling in the charged atmosphere around them but leaving it as mostly background. So by nature the book is more impersonal, more clinical and removed. The show, on the other hand, focused on realistic character development in a way that even many authors I've read could benefit from learning from. Of the two versions, I'd recommend that literally everyone watch the show, but the book is good-not-great. If you like stories about football and/or small town life, you'll likely enjoy it. If not, it's skippable. ( )