Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, by H.G. Bissinger, is a title often mentioned by students when lauding must-read books. Not being much of a football fan--horrors! that's a heretical confession for a teacher at a college-prep school famous for its academics, but also for its pin-up status in the pages of Sports Illustrated--I never did get around to reading it. But, I finally did, and thus far, my students, as usual, are batting a thousand when it comes to good recommendations.
Mixed sports metaphors aside, Bissinger offers up a reflective, documentary journalism-style examination of one fateful season in the history of the Permian Panthers, a small-town Texan high-school football team. Bissinger lovingly documents the obsessiveness surrounding the sport and highlights the dramas on the athletic field and in the locker room. Yet Friday Night Lights is so much more than a non-fiction book about football and the adolescents who play it; rather, Bissinger reveals the integral role that the sport plays in the life of Odessa, Texas, and how it is inextricably interwoven with the town's socioeconomics, race relations, and educational context.
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