The most recommended books about Philadelphia

There are many historical novels about the Great Depression but Sold on a Monday moved me in particular. Perhaps I was drawn to it because it is a fictional account of actual circumstances. More likely, though, it is because, in one single story, Sold on a Monday is a lesson in the heart-wrenching decisions hundreds of thousands of people made to ensure their survival. As far-fetched as it sounds to us now, the notion of children being sold, or simply deposited on the front doorstep by their parents, was not uncommon during the Great Depression. The author was incredibly creative and thoughtful in the way she decided to tell the story, and that is perhaps the book’s greatest strength.

More than 12,000 Philadelphia residents died when the Spanish Flu began global deaths in 1918. Although the virus had already wreaked havoc in New England, Philadelphia officials went ahead with plans for a scheduled parade designed to raise public funding for the Great War across the ocean. An estimated 200,000 people watched and cheered as soldiers, veterans, and workers involved in the war effort marched down Broad Street on Sept. 28, 1918. An article about the spectacle published that afternoon in The Evening Bulletin, began “This is a great day in Philadelphia.” 

But another article in the same edition noted that a police officer had died from the flu and more than 100 people had recently tested positive for the virus. The parade was what we now would call a “super spreader event.” Within weeks, “the grippe,” as many called the disease had killed thousands and shut down the… show more.

Drawing from her work as a journalist, Chen gives us unsettling stories crystallized by the ferocious competition that engulfs everyone in the vast anonymous landscape that is contemporary China. The endless micro-struggles of small-town individuals to escape poverty or gain an educational foothold reveal their warped understanding of society and life. Mindless mishaps, fears, and even cruelty are everyday experiences of people struggling to survive and protect their families. The great hidden human costs of China's rise are simply mind-boggling. 

A thousand-page runaway bestseller, The Quaker City sold more copies than any American novel prior to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Lippard happened to be a friend of Poe’s, and he exceeded him when it came to depicting depravity and mayhem. Underneath the surface of order and respectability, Lippard’s Philadelphia is a city pervaded by corruption and crime, and the center of it all is a vast men’s clubhouse called Monk Hall.

Three interlocking plots deploy more sex and violence than most readers would expect from a mid-nineteenth-century novel, or even a twenty-first-century novel. Lippard coins the term “grotesque-sublime” in his description of his main character, Devil-Bug, but that expression applies to the whole novel.

You might get lost in one of his sentences even as he describes a character getting lost in the secret passages of Monk Hall, but it’s a fascinating trip. Think of it as a trashy but bingeworthy… show more.

As any objective historian can tell you, there are very few spotless heroes in history, and very few villains whose wrongdoing isn't firmly rooted in the psychological and sociological forces that shaped them.

So I really admire writers who, like Kali Nicole Gross, take pains to put the bad actions of their subjects in the context of their time and circumstances. In this measured and nuanced account of a sensational 19th-century murder, Gross carefully examines Gilded Age attitudes toward race and gender, tracing their influence on the crime, its investigation, and its punishment.

The result is a book both scholarly and absorbing – not an easy feat for any author to pull off.

Writing a Woman’s Life ignited my interest in women’s stories. More significantly, Heilbrun’s feminist Kate Fansler mysteries, written via the pseudonym Amanda Cross, inspired me to transform Frances Yates into a fictional sleuth. To date, Dame Frances (DBE) has encountered other unorthodox faith traditions, as revealed in Tarot; the Convent of Sor Juana de la Cruz in Mexico; among Philadelphia Quakers; and women religious at the Ursuline Convent in Québec. To date, there have been four Frances Yates mysteries.

The little-known story of promoter Eddie Gottlieb’s South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team begins in the 1920s when professional basketball in this country was often played in a cage-encircled court to protect the athletes from the rabid fans in Philly and other cities in the hard-scrabble Eastern League. The unathletic Gottlieb kept the SPHAs at the top of the pack, along with Harlem’s all-Black Renaissance team. The story ends in the 1940s when helped organize the whites-only Basketball Association of American, the forerunner to the NBA. Gottlieb, who coached the original Philadelphia Warriors, spent the last 30 years of his life preparing each NBA season’s schedule by hand with a pencil and a legal pad.

This novel is a murder mystery, of sorts, that also has a lot to say about socio-economic divides in contemporary Korea. This was particularly interesting to me because when I lived there in the 1970s, everyone was poor. No one owned a motorbike, much less a car, and they were all barely scraping by. Now, though, great wealth and privilege have emerged alongside persistent poverty, and that class divide looks too familiar to Americans. The rich are privileged and have access to things the poor do not, including justice.

Nathanson (like me) faced the dilemma of writing biography when the subject declines to be interviewed. His approach showed me the way. The availability of digital newspaper databases has opened up enormous possibilities for research, and Nathanson took advantage of them to provide color, detail, and analysis on a grand scale. The many dozens of reporters and newspaper writers who covered Dick Allen wrote game accounts, opinion columns, and feature stories that informed, inspired, and entertained contemporary readers. They watched the games from the vantage point of the press box, peppered the players and managers with questions in the clubhouse afterward, and often rode the buses and planes with the teams. They had a level of access that is the envy of historians, and Nathanson greatly profited from their work.

A child of slavery, Still became a major figure in the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia which worked to undermine slavery by aiding the enslaved to reach freedom.

Wish I had this book when I was writing my book. There is no better book on the movement in eastern Pennsylvania and Still’s roll in it.