Robert Kerstein
Famous for six-toed cats in the Hemingway House, Sloppy Joe’s, Jimmy Buffett songs, body paint parade “costumes,” and a brief secession from the Union after which the Conch Republic asked for $1 billion in foreign aid, Key West also lies at the metaphorical edge of our sensibilities. How this unlikely city came to be a tourist mecca is the subject of Key West on the Edge: Inventing the Conch Republic (University Press of Florida, $32.95), Robert Kerstein’s new history of an island that struggles to stay unique in the wake of tourism. Kernstein is professor of government a t the University of Tampa and the author of Politics and Growth in twentieth-Century Tampa.
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