Buzz BissingerCritiques

I have not read this. Y’all I do not care for sports at all but a good book is a good book.

I enjoyed Doris Kern Goodwin’s book Wait Til Next Year so we’ll see how this stacks up. I’ll update after I read this.

This is a detailed analysis of the three-game baseball series in August 2003 between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. It is told through the eyes of Tony La Russa and delves into many details of baseball that are invisible to most fans. The author goes into Tony’s thoughts on the strategy for the game going beyond just the play-by-play thoughts. He describes the psychology of player selection, both the egos and goals of the players and the opposing lineup. He looks into the player rituals, revenge hit-by-pitcher strategies, if he can afford to hurt a player’s ego.

It does go into pitch-by-pitch commentary at times, discussing how the game and the psychology changes at each point, what options La Russa is considering and what counters he anticipates.

The writing is ok. But the author does repeatedly use bad metaphors to emphasize points at times, I’m not quite sure he knows what his target audience is, but it did kind of remind me of some baseball announcers I’ve heard.

Overall I enjoyed the book, it is a good read for the baseball enthusiast.

The thread that holds this book together is an arranged football game between all star college football players who are drafted into the military to serve on the Pacific front. The story of the game is secondary taking only a chapter to describe. The central focal point are the biographies of the players before and after the game itself. The book is a wonderful testament to the courage and sacrifice of the players and their families due to World War 2.

This was a book that was recommended to me. Otherwise I would never have chosen to read this. The title refers to a real football game played during world war 2 in December 1944 on Guadalcanal. It was between 2 Marine regiments. The Author used this game as a framing device for the story about the soldiers who played in the game. The book is about some select players who came from various backgrounds and were for the most part outstanding college players many who would go on to play pro football. Of the 65 who played in the game and fought in the bloody battle of Okinawa, 15 were killed in the battle. Bissinger does an excellent job of personalizing these players. It really personalizes the war and makes it more than just numbers. He spares nothing in describing the military at the time with competition between the Army, Navy, and Marines, bad leadership decisions, the racism against blacks etc. It also calls into play how the Japanese prolonged the war and caused needless death on all sides by refusing to surrender when there was no chance of their winning the war. Many believe that the experience of Okinawa where 250,000 people died in 80 days led to the decision to use the Atomic Bomb. It really will make you mad when see how casually leaders around the world(Putin) have no problem sending young men into war for their petty ambitions. It makes you grateful to not have to deal with what people in Europe and Asia did during World War 2 when an estimated 60 million died. This was a worthwhile read.½

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.

A fairly interesting nonfiction story about a little-known story set in the Pacific during WWII. Decently written but contains very little about the game itself. Lots of filler.½

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.

Truly, I wanted to love this book, but instead I am left with a sour taste in my mouth after finishing it. While I fell in love with Zach, Bissinger's mentally-impaired but delightful and loving son, his father Buzz comes across as such a narcissist that I just can't rate this book more highly. Because Mr. Bissinger focuses so much on his own interior whiny monologue, and his response to any kind of stress or frustration is to erupt in rage, I literally could not stand him by the end of the road trip he describes taking with Zach. I also felt that he used Zach to write a book, and therefore what kind things he did have to say about him felt saccharine and not particularly genuine. Just - blech.

I cannot give this book a rating. I picked it up semi-randomly at the library, thinking I'd read a good review of it, but not really remembering much about it.

It would be churlish of me to complain about Bissinger's self-absorption and lack of filter; I had some inkling of it going in. I'll do it anyway, though. The book seesaws between genuine affection for Zach and a constant desire for Bissinger to turn the focus onto himself so he can show the reader exactly what kind of self-hating ass he is. It's not pleasant, and gives the reader, or at least me, the feeling that they're reading a self-propelled train wreck. In any memoir about a special needs child, there is a balance between respecting the child's boundaries and privacy, and writing an honest description of the parent's life. No one ever agrees on that boundary, but at times, my own personal boundaries were crossed. In addition, calling his own son "retarded" is a deliberate provocation.

To rate this would be dishonest. It is neither good nor bad; it is a testament to the author.

A book about high school football passions run amok, *Friday Night Lights* is a disturbing tale about how some citizens of a depressed West Texas oil town (Odessa) allowed their devotion to the Permian High School Panthers to be more important than everything else. In 1988, Bissinger took a leave of absence from his job at the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper to move to Odessa, TX for a year and chronicle the lives of six Permian High football players during the 1988 season. His portrait of the town and its citizens is not a flattering one; as he relates in an epilogue or appendix of sorts that was added to later editions, Bissinger had to cancel the Odessa stop on his tour promoting *Friday Night Lights* (which originally came out in September, 1990) because of threats of bodily harm. Made into a movie, the book is a compelling read.

How could I be a Texan and not read this...
Although not from West Texas I saw hints of this even in Austin. Good book and just incredible what we put these hs kids through...

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.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFZoB17B468/

H.G. Bissinger - Friday Night Lights: Well, it’s about football. That it was mostly intriguing is a strong selling point. #cursorybookreviews #cursoryreviews½

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.

See my blog post on it:

http://gypsylibrarian.blogspot.com/2005/03/booknote-friday-night-lights.html

Having issues getting into this book. I'll give it to 20% before I abandon it.

And I abandoned it. I liked the show so much more.

Buzz Bissinger probably wasn't the first Ivy League-educated newspaperman 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 and gets at something much deeper. 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. Basing a significant chunk of your identity on a high school football team remains, I think, a dubious 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 it's 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.½

The Beginnings
In this narrative in first person, Lebron James talks about the formation of his high school basketball team and the challenges it faces in order to climb the ladder all the way to the top. The bonds that exists between the players, the style of play that the team developed and its growth as a team are exposed with details. In the book one can also know Lebron’s point of view about some challenges that he faced (e.g., the controversy about the car he received from his mother). Good reading.

In 1991, Philadelphians elected Ed Rendell mayor. The city was a mess on so many levels, but Rendell was both optimistic and fearless. A Prayer for the City covers his first term in office, in which he tackled the budget, unions, public housing, violent crime, and overall economic development. I have lived near Philadelphia for most of my adult life and recently moved into the city itself. Still, I had only the vaguest idea of how bad things were, and the reforms Rendell put in place. I found this book both enlightening and fascinating.

Bissinger’s journalism career is evident in his narrative style; it often reads like a long-form newspaper piece. And while he was clearly a Rendell supporter, he provides a fairly balanced view of the mayor’s accomplishments and the “mixed bag” still left to address in his second term and beyond. This book has piqued my interest in Philadelphia politics and day-to-day city management, and will hopefully cause me to look deeper into some of today’s issues.

It’s Friday night in the late ’80s, and the town of Odessa, Texas is deserted. Where has everyone gone? Chances are they went to the Permian High School football game. Follow the 1988 Permian Panthers as they face the ups and downs of a tough season including injuries, losses, and controversy.

With a steep tradition of winning, the young men on the team face incredible pressure to be perfect and deliver what everyone wants – another state championship. In an odd twist straight out of a movie, it could all end in a three-way coin toss. In a town that is larger than life, these young men will face the biggest challenge of theirs. Win or lose, this is the stuff of dreams and memories.

The Bottom Line: Sports fans will want to check out this pager-turner that inspired the movie and the TV series. With a main focus on sports, this book also takes a look at education, American culture, local history, economics, and politics. The updated version is just as riveting as it was when it was first published and features a look at where the young men are twenty-five years later. Still relevant today, “Friday Night Lights” will keep you on the edge of your seat as you read (or reread) this classic sports story. Highly recommended for sports fans, educators, parents, students, and history buffs.

For the complete review including Book Club Notes, please visit the Mini Book Bytes Book Review Blog.½

This is the story of the Permian football team in Odessa Texas. They are the winning-est high school football team in Texas history. The book follows the year long journey of the 1988 football team. The author moved to Odessa with his family so that he could be engrossed in the local culture and really get to know the team, coaches, and the town. Odessa is a depressed, recently desegregated town in West Texas. Known for being one of the worst cities to live in of all America, the town cares for little else besides football. Drawing crowds up 15-20 thousand people for a Friday Night game, you were a local hero and star if you ever played on the Permian High School Team. This team knows that their only goal is to win at all costs, and find that sometimes that cost it too high.



I really enjoyed this book. I shook my head several times at the stories I read about how much stress these kids were under to perform high school football. How education took not only a backseat, but basically wasn't even on the radar as long as their best players didn't have to sit out due to grades. One school took it all the way to the judges in the court to make sure that an Algebra grade could be over looked so that the kid could play on his football team. There were a few kids on the team who were as naturally bright as they were talented - one even went to Harvard. But while they were in high school, football was king, and no matter where you were in class rank, it didn't matter if you couldn't perform on the field on Friday night.



I encourage you to check this book out. I am going to watch the movie and TV show next to see how it compares.

A wonderful look at the mind of one of the greatest managers in baseball (even though I'm a Cubs fan). I enjoyed it very much!

touching story by one of the nation's great journalist and author of Friday Night Lights.

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.