To celebrate the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading we’ve curated a reading list focused on this wonderful city. Get a taste of the famous Columbia Restaurant, learn about the Summit Venture’s crash into the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, and see immigrant cigar workers carve out a space for themselves. Books are on sale with code XM20 through December 16.
Don’t miss these interviews from the Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading
Millard Fillmore Caldwell: Governing on The Wrong Side of History
Gary R. Mormino
Mormino measures the contributions of Caldwell alongside his glaring faults, discussing his complicated role in shaping modern Florida. In the current debates surrounding public memorials and historical memory in the United States, Millard Fillmore Caldwell is a timely example of one man’s contested legacy.
Find an interview with the author here: https://vimeo.com/478556185
From Saloons to Steak Houses: A History of Tampa
Andrew T. Huse
This book delves into the culture of Tampa and traces the struggles that have played out in public spaces. Huse draws from local newspaper stories and firsthand accounts to show what authorities and city residents saw and believed about these establishments and the people who frequented them.
Find an interview with the author here: https://vimeo.com/478506591
The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968
Edited by Roy Peter Clark and Raymond Arsenault
At a time when protest, violence, and confrontation defined race relations and even the South itself, Gene Patterson’s wise, sane, humorous, passionate column appeared daily on the Constitution’s editorial page, urging white southerners to become “better than we are.”
Find an interview with the editors here: https://vimeo.com/475994150
Tampa: Impressions of an Emigrant
Wenceslao Galvez y Delmonte, Translated by Noel M. Smith
Introduction and notes by Noel M. Smith and Andrew T. Huse
In 1896, Wenceslao Gálvez y Delmonte fled the violence of Cuba’s war for independence and settled in Tampa. Gálvez’s narrative mixes evocative descriptions with charming commentary to bring to life the early Cuban exile communities in Ybor City and West Tampa.
Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook, Anniversary Edition
Adela Hernandez Gonzmart and Ferdie Pacheco
This anniversary edition of The Columbia Restaurant Spanish Cookbook is a history of the elegant family restaurant, and a delicious cookbook of 178 recipes that made it famous. It is also the biography of Adela Hernandez Gonzmart, the heart of the Columbia, with commentary by Ferdie Pacheco, Adela’s childhood friend.
Skyway: The True Story of Tampa Bay’s Signature Bridge and the Man Who Brought It Down
Bill DeYoung
Skyway tells the entire story of the day a 600-foot, 20,000-ton freighter crashed into a support pier of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. Through personal interviews and extensive research, Bill DeYoung pieces together the harrowing moments of the collision, including the first-person accounts of witnesses and survivors.
Best-Loved Recipes from the Columbia Restaurant
Richard Gonzmart
Bring the savory comfort and culinary excellence of the Columbia Restaurant into your home with these twelve cherished recipes from Florida’s oldest and most honored Spanish restaurant.
The Columbia Restaurant: Celebrating a Century of History, Culture, and Cuisine
Andrew T. Huse
The Columbia’s history is rich with stories of secret stashes of liquor, backroom deals with gangsters, waiters who never forgot an order, and business challenges. Keeping in mind why people fall in love with a restaurant, the book includes favorite recipes from across the years and hundreds of photographs.
Tampa on My Mind
Edited by Kimberly Williams, Gregory Thomas, Ronald Williams, and Cheryl Borman
This book is an intimate photographic tour of Tampa that goes beyond the traditional attractions and views of the impressive city skyline. Divided into sections that illustrate distinct aspects of this world-class city, the book also includes a historical essay that chronicles the growth of Tampa over the past two centuries.
Tampa Cigar Workers: A Pictorial History
Robert P. Ingalls and Louis A. Perez, Jr.
Focusing on the public spaces of work and society as well the private sphere of the home, Tampa’s Cigar Workers tells an inspiring and deeply moving story of how immigrant cigar workers from Cuba, Spain, and Italy carved out their space in Tampa while struggling to survive economically and defending their ideals and ways of life.
More Than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa
Susan D. Greenbaum
This engaging ethnography follows Cuban exiles from Jose Marti’s revolution to the Jim Crow South in Tampa, Florida, as they shape an Afro-Cuban-American identity over a span of five generations. This study views, from the vantage of a community unique in time and place, the joint effects of ethnicity and gender in shaping racial identities.
Pacheco’s Art of Ybor City
Ferdie Pacheco
In the bright muralist-style colors that have become his stock-in-trade, Pacheco renders a storehouse of memories too vivid ever to grow dull. Picture book, memoir, history lesson, and portrait of the artist, Pacheco’s Art of Ybor City is four books in one. Together they do what only art can: they turn memory, love, and nostalgia into a city you can visit.
The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885–1985
Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta
This book tells the wonderful story of the vibrant community of Italians, Spaniards, and Cubans that grew up around the cigar industry in Tampa, Florida, at the dawn of the 20th century. The authors reveal a fascinating portrait of one of America’s most celebrated ethnic communities.
The Florida Bookshelf 