The Flamingo Rising - Hardcover

Baker, Larry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375400508 ISBN 13: 9780375400506

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1997

Synopsis

In Jacksonville, Florida, during the 1950s and 1960s, the intense rivalry between mortician Turner West and Hubert Lee, owner of America's largest drive-in movie theater, is heightened by their feud over land and the star-crossed love affair between their offspring. A first novel. 100,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Larry Baker lives with his wife and children in Iowa City, where he teaches literature and history. Currently serving his second term on the City Council of Iowa City, he is seeking reelection this fall. He can be reached at bakerl@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu.


I was raised an Army/Air Force brat. Traveled with my family all over the country and then overseas. I was introduced to my father when I was three or four.  He was sitting up in my mother's bed, sheet pulled up to the bottom of his shirtless chest, a pair of binoculars hanging from around his neck, in a room with the curtains closed. If my writing shows some character's ambivalent feelings toward his father, it is probably me using fiction as therapy.

I was married when I was eighteen. It was the Sixties. If a girl told you that she was

From the Inside Flap

ing, hilarious debut novel about loving, feuding, fireworks--and your average extraordinary family whose home is the largest drive-in movie theatre in the world.

It's the 1960s in Jacksonville, Florida (where the sixties are still the fifties), and some of America's last sweet moments of innocence are unfolding out on the coastal highway at the Flamingo Drive-In Theatre, owned and operated by the Lee family.

Patriarch Hubert Lee has a spirit and ego to match the size of his drive-in: "The symbol of human power and aspiration, the stairway to heaven," he says, describing the gigantic screen tower. But his ego is at its most unforgiving in his dealings with Turner West. Turner owns the funeral home on land adjacent to the Flamingo and wants to put a cemetery on property that Hubert owns and will never, ever, under any circumstances sell!--his gleeful stubbornness spiking an already intense rivalry between them. So when Hubert's teenage son, Abe, develops h

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375400508
• ISBN 13: 9780375400506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309