FNL, A Town, A Team, And a Dream (The Book)

[HollyQ]

There's a small discussion about the FNL book on the mrhedlund.com forums, and I scanned the photo of the real Don Billingsley in 1988 and a couple of others by request... I thought I'd post them here too:







Has anyone read it? What did you think? Personally, I think Bissinger showed his own biases about Texas, race, politics, etc, but I think the book is honest, and I think he truly came to care about the town, and not just look down on it. I loved reading about the players especially... the things I liked in the book were basically what they based the movie on.

[Fosterchild]

Great pics! I'll have to check out the book.

[maxiekat]

I borrowed the book once from work, but never got around to reading it. I may give it another shot. I love the picture of Mike Winchell at a pep rally (not posted here, but it's in the book). He has the most depressed, un-pep rally look on his face, lol.

[Elizabeth]

I may have to have a look out for that book.

[maxiekat]

Here's an interesting article about Boobie Miles. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page3/story...r/boobie/041006

[tourniquet]

So, has anyone actually read it now. Is it any good??

[HollyQ]

I read it. It is good, but I had some issues, as I said in that previous post. Bissinger was an urban Northeasterner writing about a small Texas town, and his biases were clear. It was as if he'd gone in planning to portray the whites in the town as incredibly racist and backwards. The book upset a lot of people in Odessa, and I do think they were likely unfairly portrayed overall. The movie avoided those problems, mainly by not having it from the point-of-view of an outsider who frankly looked down on them (though he did grow to have a real affection for the town after living there).

As a non-fiction book, it tells the stories of the players and coach more peripherally. You don't see the boys at home or partying, and the only dialogue are things they tell Bissinger. The movie took a lot of liberties. The team are not the book's main characters. The town is. There's a lot about economics, politics, religion, and race. But you do learn more about the kids portrayed in the movie.

[breslin]

I really like the book and I think the portrayal is pretty accurate. My best friend is from west Texas and her grandmother lives in Odessa and she agreed with me that Bissinger pretty much got it right (that's just her opinion though *shrug*). His prose can drag sometimes though and it's really obvious he doesn't write narrative novels much, so I suggest reading the book only after you've seen the movie so you have visual references to spark your interest and make it a little less boring to drudge through. Not that it's like a text book or anything, you can just tell he's a writer in training. However, it's def worth a skim at the very least. The things you learn about these boys are amazing, and you appreciate a little more what they went through.

The stuff like racism was originally supposed to be more in the movie than it was, but they cut a lot of stuff out for audience sensitivity. If you watch the old trailers and the deleted scenes you see a lot of crazy shit going down that, given the climate of the book, the year it was written and the reputation my best friend assures me Texas has little problem defending (and I believe it because for the past 12 years I've been forced to live in Florida, the boonier parts of which are as backwoodsy as the Kentucky hills) don't really shock me.

On top of that, I don't really think being from the Northeast would have made Bissinger ill-exposed to racism. My mom's side of the family is from Boston and I go back every summer and it's actually worse there in some ways because it's not just black/white. The divisions are much more culture specific (i.e.- Irish, Italian, German, Polish, and then only do you get into the black, spanish, asian, etc.). I know racism between blacks and whites is more pronounced in the south in a lot of ways, but trust me, up until about 25-30 years ago, black people and white people really couldn't even really talk to each other in public. And you still get beat up around the Irish neighborhoods if they catch you wearing orange on St. Patrick's day.

[maxiekat]

A school district in Texas is banning the book - http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheyd...299.html#cutid1 It makes me so angry just to type that.