Review by New York Times Review
SOME BOOKS ARE not meant to be read straight through, but maybe that shouldn't be held against them. Even if we learn nothing profound from them, we may get something out of plowing in. "A Flag Worth Dying For: The Power and Politics of National Symbols," by Tim Marshall, a longtime diplomatic and foreign correspondent for Sky News and the BBC, is just such a book. It takes us on a lightning tour of the world of flags, with extra space for the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack, but touching down on nearly every continent and in dozens of countries. There is something a little dutiful about this tour, but Marshall offers us a surprising fact or six along the way. I was interested to discover, for example, that Gilbert Baker, the designer of the rainbow flag that emerged as a symbol of gay pride in the late 1970s, was inspired by the ubiquity of the American flag during the bicentennial celebrations in 1976. Marshall oscillates between telling the story of the way flags unite us and the way they divide us. He is acutely aware that they often do both at the same time, and it is this tension that brings out his most illuminating writing. In one revealing instance, he describes traveling on a bus to a soccer match. When a collection of Leeds United supporters spy a group of black teenagers out the window, they begin to yell at them: " There's no black in the Union Jack! Send the bastards back!" One thing Marshall has taken away from his many years reporting abroad is that no matter how cosmopolitan they might seem, nations are essentially "tribes with flags," as the diplomat Tahseen Bashir famously put it while extolling the nationhood of his native Egypt. Marshall is especially good on how flags encode the history of the violence that brought the nations they represent into being and how quickly they can become emblems of racial and ethnic bigotry. But for all Marshall's sophistication, there are inevitably some puzzling choices. The flags of Türkey, Iran and Israel all appear in the chapter "Colors of Arabia." Marshall also tries to make other categories of flags reveal more than they probably can, as when he describes the apocalyptic design choices of vicious nonstate actors like ISIS or a more benign one like that of the European Union. The United Nations banner, he says mawkishly, and against much of the evidence he presents, can serve as a "reminder that we can come together and that for all our flaws, and all our flags, we are one family." THE WRITING IN books like this is often rushed and cramped on the one hand and glib and expansive on the other, and Marshall does not transcend the genre. The supposedly clever bits can be particularly annoying. When Marshall discusses Oliver Cromwell's abandonment of the royal flag in 1649, he mentions the regicide of King Charles I before remarking, "Eleven years later... one of them made a comeback and it wasn't the headless Charles." By the time racing's checkered flag makes an appearance on Page 260, readers may well be ready for it to fly. "A Flag Worth Dying For" does not pretend to have the kind of coherent argument about terrain begetting destiny that Marshall's previous book, "Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World," did, but it suffers from the absence of one nonetheless. Oddly, Marshall's clearest statement on the strength of feeling flags arouse occurs in the acknowledgments at the end of the book, where he points out that "flags are an emotive subject," and then pretty much leaves it at that. Readers looking for an understanding of how silk waving from a stick can come to mean everything will be disappointed, but they will not leave empty-handed either. ? AARON RETICA is a senior staff editor for the Op-Ed page of The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 30, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this brisk, entertaining read, Marshall (Prisoners of Geography) successfully answers a puzzling question: how can a simple piece of cloth come to mean so much? Whether the flag flies the Stars and Stripes, the five rings of the Olympics, or the Jolly Roger, Marshall explores its origins and political significance. He attributes the importance of flags partially to the discovery of silk, which allowed them to flutter, not hang. But the meaning of a flag is in the eye of the beholder. The U.S. flag means liberty to American citizens, but oppression to the country's detractors. Marshall pays particular attention to the significance of colors, which transcend borders: red for blood or struggle, white for peace and harmony, blue for the oceans, yellow for gold or wealth. In the Middle East, green stands for Islam. Flags can denote ideology, as in France and China. Modern hate groups appropriate symbols such as the Nazi swastika and the Confederacy's Stars and Bars to make their extreme positions visible. Flags in the developing world, or for transnational organizations such as the UN and NATO, are often aspirational, expressing pride or hope for unification. Marshall presents an informative survey of these highly visible symbols of national or international pride. Agent: George Lucas, InkWell Management. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Journalist Marshall (Prisoners of Geography) has written an entertaining whistle-stop tour of world flags. This book is roughly divided by geography and flag symbol: flags featuring crosses, flags of the Middle East, and so forth. There is, of course, an argument to be had with Marshall's choice of geographic divisions, but it makes as much sense as any other arrangement. Marshall has done (some of) his homework and relays a few interesting heraldic details about the construction of flags as visual symbols. However, students of diplomacy or nationalism will find little new here. Marshall's choice of groups, as mentioned above, is problematic, and his text does not even approach the analytical. He excels at the personal and anecdotal, and the strongest sections relate his own encounters with various flags and individuals connected with them. VERDICT A quick read best suited for general audiences. Those in search of a more scholarly treatment should look elsewhere.-Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook, Harvard Univ. Lib., Cambridge, MA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Of flags grand and old, black and blue, marking us and them and giving us all the license we need to kill.Flags, writes British journalist Marshall (Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Explain Everything About the World, 2015), are fairly modern expressions of identity; they required the genius of China's silk industry in order to "flourish and spread" and "accompany armies onto battlefields." So they have done from the time of the Silk Road on, each bearing such significance that people have been willing to fight and die in its shadow. The tricolors of Italy and France, for instance, bear red, indicating "the usual blood spilled for independence." The flags of the Scandinavian countries are marked by crosses even though those countries are among the least churchly in the worldand on that note, Marshall points out the apparent irony that the most intensely Christian nations on the planet tend not to have Christian symbols on their flags. Not so the Muslim nations, whose flags bear the symbology of Islam. Bosnians, though predominantly Muslim, could not agree on a flag after the bloody civil war there, so the United Nations imposed one from outside, "devoid of religious or historical symbols." As for the black flags of various groups such as the Islamic State, so reminiscent of the pirates' Jolly Roger, they mean to suggest no good. Conversely, Marshall recounts the history of the LGBT flag, meant, in the view of its creator, the recently deceased Gilbert Baker, to suggest "the diversity of nature" and of people but now absent of its original pink stripe because pink is an unusual color for a flag and thus more expensive to manufacture. Country by country the author considers the great diversity of the world's flags, serving up with offhand affection a lively text full of interesting anecdotes and telling details. A treasure vault for vexillologists, full of meaning beyond the hue and thread of the world's banners. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
