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Perk Up A Table With Cool Map, Photo Books

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By KAREN HAYMON LONG, The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 16, 2007

Coffee-table books make wonderful last-minute Christmas gifts - for someone else or as a gift to yourself. They focus on every possible subject, from Ansel Adams' breathtaking black-and-white photos of Yosemite National Park to the beauty of seashells.

Here's a look at some good new ones:

"Florida Then & Now," by Bruce Hunt (Westcliffe Publishers, $39.95)

By juxtaposing old photos of Florida cities and towns with new photos he took from the same vantage points, Bruce Hunt of Tampa has created a valuable record of the changes Florida has undergone over the years.

Some of the pictures also show how very much Florida hasn't changed since the 1920s, '30s and '40s.

Stately Worth Avenue in Palm Beach doesn't look so different from the way it did in a photo taken in 1946. But Tampa has a radically new look, especially its skyline and the buildings downtown along the Hillsborough River.

Longtime Floridians will enjoy looking through this book to compare their memories to the old photos. Newcomers should like it, too, to see what came before.

"100 Days in Photographs: Pivotal Events That Changed the World," by Nick Yapp (National Geographic, $35)

The classic picture of Orville Wright making the first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903 is here. So is the moving portrait of a weary Abraham Lincoln four days before his assassination.

These photos are just two from 100 days that changed the world. Six pages depict the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Six more chronicle the Iraq War.

Other photos focus on the D-Day Normandy landings, Holocaust survivors, a 1960s fallout shelter and Princess Diana.

"Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations," by Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress (Little, Brown and Co., $60)

This finely done book should captivate anyone fascinated by maps. It contains 200 gathered from the 5 million maps in the Library of Congress' Geography and Map Division.

A map appears on every page of this 252-page book - from a clay tablet map of Mesopotamia, 1500 B.C., to a map of the Internet created in 1999.

In between, we see Latin America, circa 1562, Indian reservations drawn in 1892 and a map of Louisiana's wetlands created after Hurricane Katrina.

Others new books we'd recommend: "Monuments: America's History in Art and Memory," by Judith Dupre (Random House, $45); "Our Changing Planet: The View From Space," edited by Michael D. King, Claire L. Parkinson, Kim C. Partington and Robin G. Williams (Cambridge University Press, $45); "The Shell: A World of Decoration & Ornament," by Ingrid Thomas (Thames & Hudson, $65); and "Sacred Ground: A Tribute to America's Veterans," by Tom Ruck (Regnery Publishing, $29.95).

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