A review by ifinlay642
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by Buzz Bissinger

challenging emotional informative tense medium-paced

4.0

A brilliant piece of journalism that captures one glorious, tension-filled moment in American history. You do not need to be a fan of (God knows I'm not), or even understand the rules of American Football (Lord knows I don't) in order to appreciate Friday Night Lights. Although it is ostensibly about football the sport is merely a tool used to examine life in Odessa, one of the US' many middle America boom-to-bust small towns. Several of the players are co-opted in order to delve into the class, race and religious issues and experiences that dominated the experience of life outside of the cultural capitals. It is in these chapters that Bissinger is at his finest discussing the terrifying precariousness of oil towns or the long-running campaigns to desegregate the schools deep into the 1970s. Other chapters focus on day-to-day life of several different players which are interesting although a tad-repetitive. Whatever repetitiveness is forgiven however by the final fifty-pages of gut wrenching tension that had me reading well past my allotted work break time. I genuinely did not know I cared so much for Ivory Christian, Coach Gaines or the rest of the Permian Panthers.