Friday+night+lights+H.G.+Bissinger

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=Book Summary= Secular religions are fascinating in the devotion and zealousness they breed, and in Texas, high school football has its own rabid hold over the faithful. H.G. Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, enters into the spirit of one of its most fervent shrines: Odessa, a city in decline in the desert of West Texas, where the Permian High School Panthers have managed to compile the winningest record in state annals. Indeed, as this breathtaking examination of the town, the team, its coaches, and its young players chronicles, the team, for better and for worse, //is// the town; the communal health and self-image of the latter is directly linked to the on-field success of the former. The 1988 season, the one //Friday Night Lights// recounts, was not one of the Panthers' best. The game's effect on the community--and the players--was explosive. Written with great style and passion, //Friday Night Lights// offers an American snapshot in deep focus; the picture is not always pretty, but the image is hard to forget. //--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.//

=About the Author=

H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger is among the nation's most honored and distinguished writers. A native of New York City, Buzz is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Livingston Award, the American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award and the National Headliners Award, among others. He also was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He is the author of three highly acclaimed nonfiction books: Friday Night Lights, A Prayer for the City and Three Nights in August. Buzz has been a reporter for some of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers; a magazine writer with published work in Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine and Sports Illustrated; and a co-producer and writer for the ABC television drama NYPD Blue. Two of his works were made into the critically acclaimed films Friday Night Lights and Shattered Glass; three more are in active development. Friday Night Lights also serves as the inspiration for the television series of the same name, which will begin its third season on NBC. (Read Nancy Franklin's October 8 New Yorker review of the series here. Buzz graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1972 and the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. His journalism career began at the Ledger-Star in Norfolk, Va. He then moved to The St. Paul Pioneer Press and later The Philadelphia Inquirer. It was at the Inquirer in 1987 that he and two colleagues won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting a six-part investigative series on the Philadelphia Court System. In 1988, Buzz left the Inquirer and moved to Odessa, Texas to write Friday Night Lights, a book about the impact of high school football on small-town life. The New York Times number one bestseller, published in 1990, has sold roughly two million copies and is still in print. Buzz worked as an investigative journalist for The Chicago Tribune from 1990 to 1992. In 1992, he returned to Philadelphia to begin work on A Prayer for the City. Granted unprecedented access by then-Mayor Edward G. Rendell, Buzz's book, five-and-a-half years in the making, garnered critical acclaim nationwide and was hailed as a classic on politics and urban America.