Seventh Flag - Softcover

Romain, Dianne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1684630142 ISBN 13: 9781684630141

Publisher: Sparkpress, 2019

Synopsis

The US and Europe have unraveled since World War II and radicalism has metastasized into every community, tearing away the decency, optimism, and security that shaped those robust democracies for more than eight decades. No place is immune, including the small West Texas town of Dell City, where four generations of an iconic American family and a Syrian Muslim family carve a farming empire out of the unforgiving high desert.

These families' partnership is as unlikely as the idea of a United States, and their powerful friendship can be traced back to a bloody knife fight in a Juarez cantina just after World War II. The bond forged that night between Jack Laws, an Irish American who staked his claim in West Texas after the war, and Ali Zarkan, whose great-grandfather sailed from the Middle East to Texas in the mid-1800s as part of President Franklin Pierce's attempt to create the US Army Camel Corps, shapes each generation of the families as they come of age and adapt to shifting paradigms of gender, commerce, patriotism, loyalty, religion, and sexuality. From the beaches of the Western Pacific to the battlefields of the Middle East and from the lawless streets of Juarez to the darkest corners of the Internet, the two families fight real and perceived enemies--journeying, as they do, through the football fields of Texas and West Point, the hippie playgrounds of Asia, the music halls of Austin, the terrorist cells of Europe and the political backrooms where fortunes are gained or lost over the rights to Western water. Underlying their experiences is the basic question of what constitutes identity and citizenship in America, or in Texas, a land over which six flags have flown. The seventh flag, ultimately, is not one of a state or a nation, but of a mosaic of cultures, religions, and people from every corner of the world--all struggling to define what it means to be unified under an ambiguous banner.

About this title

About the Author

Dianne Romain lives with novelist Sterling Bennett in Guanajuato, a colonial city in the central Mexican highlands. She grew up and went to college in Missouri before moving to Berkeley for graduate school. After completing her PhD in philosophy, she stayed in California, where she taught feminist ethics and philosophy of emotion at Sonoma State University and published Thinking Things Through, a critical thinking textbook. After moving to Mexico, she took up the trumpet; she has since played jazz and classical duets in the plazas of Guanajuato. With honorary grandchildren in Canada, the US, and Spain, Romain often finds herself writing on the go. In Guanajuato, she enjoys teaching beginning Lindy Hop, taming the four scaredy-cats that scrambled over her garden wall, and walking hillside goat trails.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sparkpress
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1684630142
• ISBN 13: 9781684630141
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248