Author Interview with Buzz Bissinger about “The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II”

Pulitzer Prize Award winning author Buzz Bissinger is known in St. Louis for his 2009 book “Three Nights in August” about the baseball Cardinals and then manager Tony LaRussa…where the skipper’s legendary style of management is explored.

And Buzz is best known around the world for being the creator of the work, “Friday Night Lights”…first published in 1990. This storied look at the high school football culture in the town Odessa, Texas went on to explore the players, parents, coaches, city dwellers, and the game of football to a wide literary AND television audience.

When you see the title of his latest work, “The Mosquito Bowl”, and find out it deals with a real life Marine football game on Guadalcanal just before the bloody battle of Okinawa among former college football players in World War II, you can be forgiven for thinking that this is a book that revolves around the sport of football.

But you’d be wrong.

Bissinger uses the players and their backgrounds as a lens to tell the story of the lead up to and prosecution of part the Pacific War…until just before the direct assault on the home islands of Japan took place by the Allies in 1944-45.

He doesn’t shy away from the blood, gore, politics, sacrifice that comes with war, in general…and he doesn’t shy away from the racism and sexism that the US practiced, to its detriment, either.