Lone Star Nation
-
- $20.99
-
- $20.99
Publisher Description
To most Americans, Texas has been that love-it-or-hate it slice of the country that has sparked controversy, bred presidents, and fomented turmoil from the American Civil War to George W. Bush. But that Texas is changing—and it will change America itself.Richard Parker takes the reader on a tour across today's booming Texas, an evolving landscape that is densely urban, overwhelmingly Hispanic, exceedingly powerful in the global economy, and increasingly liberal. This Texas will have to ensure upward mobility, reinvigorate democratic rights, and confront climate change—just to continue its historic economic boom. This is not the Texas of George W. Bush or Rick Perry.Instead, this is a Texas that will remake the American experience in the twenty-first century—as California did in the twentieth—with surprising economic, political, and social consequences. Along the way, Parker analyzes the powerful, interviews the insightful, and tells the story of everyday people because, after all, one in ten Americans in this century will call Texas something else: Home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to Governor Rick Perry, about 1,000 people arrive in Texas daily, a land this study's author calls the "very epicenter of change in America in the 21st century." Parker, a thoughtful journalist whose passion for his home state is evident but not worshipful, cites plenty of figures, including that Texas makes up one-sixth of the U.S.'s GDP, and that 4 million people have moved there so far this century. Parker's Texas is a land of rapid change, from the oil boom that began in 1901 to the rise of the "Texas Triangle" of Houston, Austin and El Paso, propelling such rapid economic growth that it's hard to believe Austin had a 40% commercial vacancy rate downtown as late as 1987. He also shows the rising Latino population as poised to profoundly change a state never shy about polishing its history to a gleaming white cowboy mythos. Pithily summarizing recent political history, Parker covers Perry's disastrous Presidential bid and State Senator Wendy Davis's filibuster to block an anti-abortion bill. This modern mega-state, Parker argues eloquently, is not a conservative dinosaur, but a rapidly changing vastness that like America, is undergoing profound shifts, and "will continue doing so while being paradoxically more like America, too and yet, particular and distinct."
