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    Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
    Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
    Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream
    Audiobook14 hours

    Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

    Written by H.G. Bissinger

    Narrated by Tom Stechschulte

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The 25th anniversary edition of the #1 New York Times bestseller and Sports Illustrated’s best football book of all time, with a new afterword by the author.

    Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa—the winningest high school football team in Texas history. Socially and racially divided, Odessa isn’t known to be a place big on dreams, but every Friday night from September to December, when the
    Panthers play football, dreams can come true.

    MO-JO! MO-JO! The haunting cheer rocks the stadium filled with 20,000 fans, who are there not only to cheer on their beloved team, but also to reignite their own aspirations and dreams through the young men on the gridiron.

    Pulitzer Prize–winning author H. G. Bissinger unforgettably captures a season in the life of Odessa: the coaches, parents, fans and—most of all—the players, who carry an entire city’s self-respect on their shoulders. From the prayer that opens the Watermelon Feed before the first
    game, through the heart-stopping season and its dramatic ending, Bissinger renders a taut, indelible scene: the stale, sweltering air, the demanding play on the field, the exhilarating wins, and the punishing—sometimes devastating—losses.

    Friday Night Lights is both a deeply moving story and a deeply disturbing one. It is a startling examination of the role of high school sports in America—but it is about much more than just sports. As David Halberstam writes: “By choosing towrite about something small—the culture of
    high school football in a Texas town—Bissinger has ended up writing about something large: the core values of our society."

    “A brilliant look at how Friday-night lights can lead a town into darkness.”—Sports Illustrated
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateDec 25, 2015
    ISBN9781501911491
    Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

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    Reviews for Friday Night Lights

    4/5

    607 ratings44 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is one of my favorite books just reread it after about 12 years
    • 4/5
      I've seen the movie, watched the show, and now I have conquered the original.
    • 5/5
      This is a great book. Bring me back to my high school playing days.
    • 5/5
      I will admit that I picked this up largely because I had just finished the first season of the TV show, and my parents really wanted me to get a book at the bookstore, and this is what I chose. However, I don't regret that choice as all; this is one of the best books on sports and society that I've ever read.The book looks at a year of football for the Permian Panthers, a perennial high school football power from Odessa, Texas. There is some football stuff, in terms of games and such, yes, but it looks more at the lives of the players and the role that football plays in the society there. These people are peaking in their lives at 18, giving everything they have to the sport and then generally losing it; the educational system around it is often a joke; the game itself is held truly as a religious rite, it seems. There's also talk of racism in the area, and the feelings of supremacy that the kids get from being football players.None of this may be exactly new, but it's taken to great depths, and the style of the writing and the layout makes the book a very compelling story. The focus may be on a few of the players, but it really looks out at the society around it, and it's not all that pretty, even if it's remarkable how much people can pull together in pride over their town and their team. The TV show definitely got the spirit right.Anyway, if you're interested in books on the role of sports in society, the line forms here. Really. Start with this one. It's very, very good.
    • 5/5
      "Homicide - A year on the killing streets" - only for the football set. Yes, this is a great compliment.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      A look at Permian High School foot ball program in 1988. H.G. Bissinger followed this team for one season, then in this edition went back 25 years later to follow up his book. It is a raw look at many issues that our country faces today.
    • 5/5
      Perhaps the best sports book in history and perfect for those who don't give a care about sports. About a city, pain and America. Beautiful and sad.
    • 5/5
      This is a powerful work on a small section of American culture that has had, and still has, far too great an impact. It is a statement about what things some people hold to be more valuable than education, family, or nation. It also may answer the question for future generations why America was more interested in "bread and circuses" than the problems we faced.
    • 5/5
      Buzz Bissinger probably wasn't the first Ivy League-educated newpaperman to leave a job in a big eastern city in search of something real in the American heartland: putting it that way makes his decision to follow the Permian High School football team Odessa, Texas for the entirety of the 1988 season sound like a bad movie. What's really shocking is that he actually did find a story worth telling in West Texas, and one that avoids a lot of sports-movie clichés. He found, or rather, just observed the sort of blatant racism that had become a thing of the past in most Eastern cities by the late eighties, a public school system that offered its students, at its best, a mediocre education, a well-intentioned desegregation process that satisfied absolutely no one, and an athletic system that elevated seventeen year-old kids to near-godhood but discarded them as soon as they got hurt or graduated. He also found a town that worked hard, drank hard, and identified to a fanatical degree with the fortunes of its high school football team. It's pretty clear that Bissinger's politics lean to the left and that he's not an unalloyed fan of everything that he witnessed during his stay in Texas. When you read about several people planting "For Sale" signs outside the houses of both coaches and players after a regular-season loss, it's hard not to at least consider the possibility that Odessa, Texas is a town full of rural Americans -- I think that's the preferred nomenclature -- that are a bit short on kindness and who desperately need something to do with their time on Fridays after work. A purely political reading of "Friday Night Lights" would have readers conclude that most aspects of life in Odessa, Texas and almost everything about its outsize relationship to its football team constitute absolutely unforgivable outrages. After all, even Larry McMurtry -- no Yankee he -- called the place "the worst town on Earth." It's a credit to Bissinger, who's an exquisitely observant journalist with a beautifully natural, readable prose style, that "Friday Night Lights" isn't merely a political book. The author realizes that there's something quintessentially American about Odessa in the independence and unpretentiousness of the people he finds there and their sheer devotion to their team. Whether or not it's a good idea to base a significant chunk of your identity on a high school football team is a debatable proposition, but Bissinger does show that the Permian Panthers do give the town something that they can take real pride in. The helps forge real connections between people in Odessa, particularly at a time when the strains brought on by globalization -- the loss of manufacturing jobs, the influence of OPEC, the country's changing demographics -- were just beginning to show. It sometimes seems inexcusable for Permian's fans to place so much physical and social pressure on what are really just a bunch of kids, and the descriptions of the injuries they sustain and the emotional strain that they're subjected to can be pretty gruesome, but their willing participation in it is what makes this book, which is about an exclusively American sport played in a nowhere American town, appeal to larger, grander universal themes. The epilogue included in the 25th edition of the book makes it clear: big-time high school football is a painful, back-breaking, ultimately unproductive endeavor, but there is a sort of glory in it too. It is, in other words, not an outrage as much as it is a tragedy. This is perhaps truest for Boobie Miles, a black teenager abandoned by his parents whose dreams of NFL stardom end abruptly with a knee injury when he's in his senior year. Bissinger makes it clear that Boobie's sudden transformation from savior to pariah is inexcusable: an example of the system at its worst. Things end up a little brighter for the other five players that form the core of the team that Bissinger portrays here, though, and its lovely to see how much they're able to change over the course of twenty-five years. They seem reasonably content with their lives, proving that who you were in high school doesn't always dictate who you'll be for the rest of your life. But some former Panthers admit to the author that nothing can quite match the emotional highs of the experiences they had playing Texas high school football. Their glory was sweet, but fleeting. It's wonderful that Bissinger was able to document it so well before the next crop of high school seniors came along to take their places.
    • 4/5
      I love football: I love watching football, I love reading about football. This was a great story about a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, named the Permian Panthers, and their attempt to make it to the state championship in 1988. In a town like Odessa, there isn't much to look forward to except for football, and the Panthers would often draw crowds of up to 20,000 people on a Friday night. People would wait in line for two days to get tickets. To a high school football game. Can you even begin to imagine that? I can't. The pressure these kids were under is staggering. It's a compelling and gripping story, full of tension and obsession.
    • 4/5
      I didn't think that I would be interested in the "New Classic." But the author hits this one out of the park, weaving a story together of the intimate details of the lives of the players, the coach, and the community. This might take place in Texas but it is a classic coming of age story. The revised edition with the afterward, 25 years later, is almost as expected.
    • 5/5
      I can't believe I'm giving this book 5 stars, but that's how good it is. I didn't want to like it and in fact have resisted all things FNL in spite of (or because of) being a native Texan. But the storytelling and the story and the history were wonderfully done. It is relevant to our times even now and I just might have to watch the movie and/or the series now.
    • 4/5
      Excellent long-form reporting into Texas high school football through the lens of a small town in the late 1980s. I particularly recommend the 25 anniversary edition as the boys of the book are now middle-aged and their where-are-they-nows are both bitter and sweet. Not at all like the TV show which is fantastic, but not a substitute for the book. The book trumps the movie version. Some of the reporting on the oil industry in Odessa/Midland is more of a snapshot of point-in-time, but the town's relationship to football is sadly, frighteningly, as true as it ever was. Maybe more so. Recommended--you don't have to be a sports / football fan, necessarily to like or appreciate it.
    • 4/5
      You will come away knowing at least two very important things about Texas: when an oil boom is on, people go a little mad. When the boom is off, they get a little sad. But through it all, the one thing they can count on is high school football. Players are fed into the Permain football system not unlike soldiers sent off to war. So long as they perform and are on track to win state, nothing more is expected of them, especially not keeping up their test scores. But as soon as that knee gives out and your dream of playing in the pros is lost forever, don't look for any favors. The percentage of players who actually make the pros is staggeringly low, but so long as the dream exists, the boys will come, and on Friday nights, the entire town will come to see them under the lights.
    • 4/5
      Although football is certainly at the center of it, this book is more about the economics and politics of a small town in Texas than I expected. It also reads more like non-fiction than I expected--maybe my expectations were skewed because of my experience with the movie and the tv show (and this is why I always try to read the book first). Some of the stories are absolutely shocking, and this book/town is one beautiful example of how, as a society, we value physical ability above all else. It makes you think about how twisted our priorities are.
    • 4/5
      I confess I'm a sports fan; but I could just not understand how High School Football defined a town and what it stood for to such an extent. This is the remarkable true story of a town, a team, and a dream; the story of young teenagers giving everything they have for the greater glory of the team.The town politics are clearly conservative and summed up as, "The Republicans have done nothing to help the Texas oilman for eight years, but when it comes down to voting for a liberal versus a conservative, most oilmen are conservatives."Boobie miles perhaps personifies the team with his comment, "If I can't be the center of attention, I don't want to be anything at all."
    • 5/5
      In 1988 the author, a Philadelphia journalist, moved to Odessa, Texas, to follow the football team of Permian High School which was seeking to win the Texas high school football champioship. One gets to know the principal players and the coach as the season's games are played. The school over-emphsizes football to a sickening extent but one has to be for the kids as they seek their place in the sun. I found the book an exciting and disturbing read. The edition I read had a ten-year follow-up, telling of what had happened since 1988, which was good to put the events in pespective. On Sports Illustrated's list of the 100 greatest books on sports this account is No. 4, and is the highest-ranked book on football on the list.
    • 4/5
      A great documentation of west Texas life and football, which inspired one of my all time favorite tv shows. This goes into issues of race and education, as well as the economic state of the town of Odessa and how that relates to football, which was very interesting. It's a way of life that is completely foreign to me, but Bissinger certainly brought it to life. Sometimes his writing leaned a bit towards the sensational, with sudden flashbacks, sub plots or the use of way too many hyperbolic adjectives, but overall he told this story nicely. It was also very obvious how much he cared about the students on the football team, as well as the residents of the town.
    • 4/5
      I did not want to read this book, but in the end I am glad I did because Bissinger dispassionately examines the intersections of race, class, America's business cycle and more in these pages through the lens of a west Texas high school football program. An engrossing read and a brave book.
    • 4/5
      I bought this Kindle book for banned books week. Although I am not an avid sports fan, I was engrossed by the portrayal of the Texas town that focuses on its high school football team. The book, written by a reporter who lived in Odessa, Texas for a year, is twenty years old. Its story is still poignant.
    • 5/5
      Interesting read about the Permian High School football team in 1988. Odessa is a town that lives and dies with its high school team. I liked how individuals were focused on and what they had to say. I liked also that we knew what happened to them after the season was over. I would like to know what is happening with them now.
    • 4/5
      Hmmm. Friday night lights is nonfiction written by a reporter, but so much of his subjective (and negative) opinion of the South and southern people spills out that it was a difficult read. As a black honor student who went to high school in the rural south during the late 80’s/early 90’s and whose black Fullback was the big man on campus and later played in the NFL, my recollection of race relations is a lot different from Bissinger’s judgment. I remember going to bonfires and pool parties at my white classmates homes. There was even some open interracial dating. I never heard the “N” word unless someone black was saying it. Frankly, I didn’t really learn a lot about racism until I moved north to Philadelphia and people there told these apocryphal tales of black life in the south and made distinctions in degrees of blackness - light skinned versus dark skinned. (I’m dark skinned but did not know it until the northerners told me so.) Sure, the white people back in my small town had (and have) simple values. They didn’t dream of seeing the world or being on lifestyles of the rich and famous, but they were fundamentally decent folks who were basically happy with their lot in life. They wanted the best for their families and wished the rest of us well too. So maybe this Odessa was just a particularly shitty place to grow up or maybe the Philadelphian Bissinger just saw what he expected to see. Either way, Friday Night Lights is an interesting read because it forces us to see student athletes as the kids they truly are with adults who, because of self-interest or lack of interest, don’t provide proper education or guidance leaving kids to make grown-up decisions they’re ill-equipped to make.
    • 4/5
      This book came out about 20 years ago, so some of the types and scenes that were undoubtedly fresh when Bissinger wrote them feel a little cliche by now. Still, this is a powerful book. Bissinger does a great job of showing just how corrosive it can be to these teenagers to lionize them as high school football stars without preparing them in the least for the future, while still making the reader's heart race as the Permiam team advances in the play-offs. Football may be a destructive force in the lives of these young men, but it is also what makes this desperate town feel extraordinary, and that's a difficult thing to condemn. I love books that show how much power sports can have in a community, for better or worse, and this is the gold standard.
    • 4/5
      What more can I say about this? It's a movie, it's a television show. I guess all I can say is that I read it before it was either and I was sold.
    • 5/5
      Friday Night Lights is based on the 1988 Permian High School football team in Odessa, Texas. The team brings unity to the town every Friday night to rally in support of one common goal, to win. The football team is known for winning numerous State Championships and having great seasons. Odessa has two things, football and oil rigs. It is a racist community that only supports the African Americans when they are on the football field. Teachers could care less about the players’ grades because the game is more important to them. Permian’s star running back, Boobie Miles is one of the best running back in the country. He injures his knee before the start of the season and his return is questionable. With Boobie down it is time for someone else to shine. Quarterback Mike Winchell now has to step up and play better than anyone ever expected him to, otherwise he will be replaced. The Permians have a chance at the playoffs, like they always do, but the question is will they capitalize again? Bissinger does a wonderful job of putting the reader in the scheme. When reading it, I felt as if I was there. Clayton D.
    • 5/5
      I came to this book in the wrong direction. I first saw the television show, before seeing the movie upon which it was based. Only now do I get around to reading the book that set the whole thing in motion.

      To make a long story short, it's great. Having seen its descendants, there weren't a lot of surprises, but it was nice to see that (at least before the final section of the book about the postseason) it cares more about the town than the team, carefully documenting the rise and fall of Permian, while only using the Panthers sparingly.

      It's pretty relentless; constantly hammering home the idea that these young men, and through them, the town, are reaching the peak of their lives while still in high school. It's a bleak vision, but one that rings painfully true. I was never an athlete, and the closest I've ever come to the feelings these boys (and men) go through was in my high school's theater program. It's not the same thing, but I think I can recognize echoes of the football experience, from the exhilarating highs to the empty feelings of loss. It's scary to think that I've already done everything good that I'm ever capable of achieving.

      Strangely, the book's biggest gut punch comes from the story of the players from Carter, the team that defeats Permian. The fact that those kids, just about to reach the golden ring of college (and potentially professional) football, could ruin everything by turning to a life of armed robbery is so strange, that I'd accuse Bissinger of fiction, if I didn't know it was true. It's a tiny moment near the end of a large and magnificent work, but it's a terrifying summation of the whole.
    • 5/5
      Very good! In Odessa, Texas is one of the worlds most powerful high school football teams in the country. Their running back, Bobbie Miles, tramps over all his opponents, but when tragity strikes the team will have to rally together and play throught the season. The book is not a "fast" read but not slow either. I found it hard to put down after the first ten chapters and stayed up hlf the night reading to see what will happen next. A good read for teens through adults, or any sports fan. I most deffinatly recomend it!!!!!!
    • 5/5
      This is my favorite sports book of all time. It is ostensibly about high school football, but really it speaks to so much more than that. It speaks directly to the American experience. What do we hold important, how do we view race and socioeconomics and how do all of those factors change when a person can carry a football? What is it like to have your life peak at 18 year old? How does class affect how you view the world? Football matters in Texas. How much it matters and how it changes the social order is fascinating. Love this book.
    • 4/5
      The Odessa Panthers were one of the best teams in the great state of Texas back in the late ’60 and early ’70. The team has won the state championship five out of the last seven years. They were on their way to another one until the star running back torn his ACL in the spring game and was out for the rest of the season. Out of no-where the freshman running back became a star and carried the team to the state playoffs. The Panthers were one minute away from going to championship and were five points down and on the seven yard line. The quarter back throws a interception to end the game. They go back to Odessa losers. The next season they go undefeated in and the in the playoffs they have some shaky, very close games. Somehow they pull it off and win the championship game and bring back the trophy to Odessa. I would recommend this book to people that like football.