PA Books: “Beethoven in Beijing” with Jennifer Lin (2022)

In 1973, Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China. But in a remarkable breakthrough cultural exchange, the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted a tour of closed-off China, becoming the first American orchestra to visit the communist nation. Jennifer Lin’s “Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Historic Journey to China” provides a fabulous […]

PA Books: “A Killer at the Door” with Bruce Mowday

In summer 2023, Chester County, Pennsylvania, was shaken by the daring escape of convicted murderer Danilo Cavalcante. Using a “crab-walking” method, Cavalcante scaled a prison wall, sparking a gripping two-week manhunt. He traversed forests, farmlands, and neighborhoods, evading law enforcement and causing schools to close, businesses to shutter, and streets to empty. The pursuit showcased […]

PA Books: “Boxed out of the NBA” with Syl Sobel & Jay Rosenstein (2022)

The Eastern Professional Basketball League (1946-78) was fast and physical, often played in tiny, smoke-filled gyms across the northeast and featuring the best players who just couldn’t make the NBA—many because of unofficial quotas on Black players, some because of scandals, and others because they weren’t quite good enough in the years when the NBA […]

PA Books: “Moravian Soundscapes” with Sarah Justina Eyerly (2021)

In “Moravian Soundscapes,” Sarah Eyerly contends that the study of sound is integral to understanding the interactions between German Moravian missionaries and Native communities in early Pennsylvania. In the mid-18th century, when the frontier between settler and Native communities was a shifting spatial and cultural borderland, sound mattered. People listened carefully to each other and […]

PA Books: “On a Great Battlefield” with Jennifer Murray (2024)

Of the more than seventy sites associated with the Civil War era that the National Park Service manages, none hold more national appeal and recognition than Gettysburg National Military Park. Welcoming more than one million visitors annually from across the world, the National Park Service at Gettysburg holds the enormous responsibility of preserving the war’s […]

PA Books: “The Soul of Pittsburgh” with Ed Simon

Pittsburgh contains multitudes. The city bestows a character of contradiction, love of place and strength of community on anyone lucky to be born and raised there. A town whose rivers were once lined with belching steel mills but also hosted the world’s first major modern art exhibition is not easily defined. From the decline of […]

PA Books: “Jazz in the Hill” with Colter Harper

From the 1920s through the 1960s, Pittsburgh’s Hill District was the heart of the city’s Black cultural life and home to a vibrant jazz scene. In Jazz in the Hill: Nightlife and Narratives of a Pittsburgh Neighborhood, Colter Harper looks at how jazz shaped the neighborhood and created a way of life. Beyond backdrops for […]

PA Books: “Into the Cold Blue” with John Homan

One of the last great memoirs of World War II, Into the Cold Blue is a riveting account of the air war over Europe, when hell was four miles above the earth. A born daredevil, John Homan joined the Army Air Forces after the attack on Pearl Harbor. By 1944, he was co-piloting a B-24 […]

PA Books: “Gen X Pittsburgh” with David Rullo (2024)

Beginning in the early 1990s, Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood began to transform from the post-industrial morass it had been suffering for the last few decades. Artists began to rent empty apartments, what were once shot-and-a-beer bars became hip dive bars and entrepreneurs found inexpensive real estate to follow their visions. It was in this landscape […]