Review by Booklist Review
Pulitzer Prize winner Bissinger left his job with the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1988 and moved to Odessa, Texas. There he began to shadow the Permian Panthers football team. To characterize his book as a study of high school football in football-crazy Texas is misleading and limiting. Is All the President's Men about robbery? Bissinger's memorable account is about people: players, coaches, teachers, parents, cheerleaders, and fans. For example, star player Brian Chavez developed an interest in senior English that delighted his teacher and his parents, and added depth to an already admirable young man. Bissinger also explores the generally sorry state of education, the boom-bust economy of Texas, and the curious politics of blue-collar conservatism. High school football is probably too important in Odessa, at least to those of us looking in from the outside. From the insider's view Bissinger so carefully provides, Friday night and football makes perfect sense. No index. ~--Wes Lukowsky
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bissinger spent 1988 with his wife and children in Odessa, Tex., principally following the high-school football team, but also observing life in this dusty, unsophisticated town. This is his superb, if disquieting, portrait of heartland America as he found it. For Odessa residents, the Permian Panthers, consistently contenders--and sometimes victors--in the state championship tournament for 30 years have become a virtual religion, although most of the townspeople are also bona fide churchgoers. After graduation, the teenagers on the team, most of whom are not well enough endowed to go on to college or pro ball, take their place among the other good ole boys at the Boosters Club, where they can recall their glory days together. 75,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In 1988, Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Philadelphia Inquirer editor, left his job to spend a year with a high school sports team. The sport he picked was football, the location, the depressed West Texas oil town of Odessa, called by Larry McMurtry ``the worst town on earth.'' Here 20,000 fans turn out regularly to watch their Permian Panthers win. Here there is no high-blown talk of playing the game well; just the raw need to win at all costs. In this atmosphere, players vomit from nervousness before each game and often play with injuries. On the few occasions when the team suffers a loss, the coach's front lawn sprouts ``For Sale'' signs. Bissinger makes you feel the tensions of the kids, who are not just playing a game, but literally fighting for the honor of their town. He also accomplishes the more difficult feat of making the team's rabid fans sympathetic. His language sometimes verges on the overblown, but it does echo the mythical proportions of the game and a season that will render the rest of the players' lives a dull denouement. Fascinating even for those, or maybe especially for those, with no interest in football.-- Nora Rawlinson, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An appalling but altogether engrossing appreciation of why high-school football is not just a game in one all-too-typical Texas city. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bissinger took a year's leave of absence to settle in Odessa, a down-at-the-heel oil town (population ca. 100,000) in the western part of the Lone Star State. While the municipality's economic fortunes wax and wane with those of the energy industry, its heart is ever true to the Permian Panthers, one of America's premier high-school football teams. Since 1964, Permian has won five state championships and made the playoffs 17 times. Few of the overachieving teen-agers who compiled these records, however, have gone to to college, let alone professional, gridiron careers, and many have suffered debilitating injuries as well as psychological traumas on the hard road to short-lived glory. Bissinger offers a tellingly detailed account of Permian's 1988 season, which extended from August through mid-December, when the squad lost a semifinal title contest by one point. Letting the facts speak largely for themselves, he documents how community pressures force educators to turn a blind eye to the means used to keep youthful athletes eligible to compete on Friday nights throughout the fall and early winter. The author also shows the insidious ways in which the tradition of autumnal madness affects students, their parents, elected officials, and the local populace as well as teachers. In brief, he demonstrates, to say that Odessa--with its pep rallies, motorcades, wildly cheering crowds at a stadium that seats 20,000, and insistence on nothing less than total victory--overemphasizes the so-called sport of high-school football is vastly to understate the case. A sorry tale, well told, of a fearful misallocation of resources, human and otherwise. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
