PA Books: “You Say To Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn”

Wendy Lesser’s “You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn” is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as […]

PA Books: “Last Don Standing”

As the last Don of the Philadelphia mob, Ralph Natale, the first-ever mob boss to turn state’s evidence, provides an insider’s perspective on the mafia. Natale’s reign atop the Philadelphia and New Jersey underworlds brought the region’s mafia back to prominence in the 1990s. Smart, savvy, and articulate, Natale came up in the mob and […]

PA Books: “War in the Peaceable Kingdom”

On the morning of September 8, 1756, a band of about three hundred volunteers of a newly created Pennsylvania militia led by Lt. Col. John Armstrong crept slowly through the western Pennsylvania brush. The night before they had reviewed a plan to quietly surround and attack the Lenape, or Delaware, Indian village of Kittanning. The […]

PA Books: “A Civil War Captain & His Lady”

More than 150 years ago, 27-year-old Irish immigrant Josiah Moore met 19-year-old Jennie Lindsay, a member of one of Peoria, Illinois’s most prominent families. The Civil War had just begun, Josiah was the captain of the 17th Illinois Infantry, and his war would be a long and bloody one. Their courtship and romance, which came […]

PA Books: The Life & Songs of Stephen Foster

The Life and Songs of Stephen Foster offers an engaging reassessment of the life, politics, and legacy of the misunderstood father of American music. Once revered the world over, Foster’s plantation songs, like “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home,” fell from grace in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement due to […]

PA Books: The Politics of Black Citizenship

Considering Baltimore and Philadelphia as part of a larger, Mid-Atlantic borderland, “The Politics of Black Citizenship” shows that the antebellum effort to secure the rights of American citizenship was central to black politics—it was an effort that sought to exploit the ambiguities of citizenship and negotiate the complex national, state, and local politics in which […]

“The Thousand Dollar Dinner”

In 1851, fifteen wealthy New Yorkers wanted to show a group of Philadelphia friends just how impressive a meal could be and took them to Delmonico’s, New York’s finest restaurant. They asked Lorenzo Delmonico to “astonish our Quaker City friends with the sumptuousness of our feast,” and assured him that money was no object, as […]

PA Books: Worst. President. Ever.

“Worst. President. Ever.” flips the great presidential biography on its head, offering an enlightening—and highly entertaining!—account of poor James Buchanan’s presidency to prove once and for all that, well, few leaders could have done worse. But author Robert Strauss does much more, leading readers out of Buchanan’s terrible term in office—meddling in the Dred Scott […]

“Life, Liberty, and the Mummers”

The Mummers Parade is like no other parade in the world. With 10,000 wildly-costumed participants stepping out every New Year’s Day in South Philadelphia, it is one of the most spectacular annual parades in the U.S. This remarkable book is a “family portrait” of the parade. It presents, in pictures and in words, the flamboyantly-attired […]

PA Books: “Mission: Jimmy Stewart & the Fight for Europe”

On a Saturday in March 1941, Jimmy Stewart, America’s boy-next-door actor, left Hollywood behind and took the oath of service in the United States Army Air Corps. Once in the service, Stewart ducked the press at every opportunity and to a large extent for the next four years remained behind the secure perimeters of air […]