PA BOOKS on PCN

Fairmount Park is the municipal park system of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It consists of more than one hundred parks, squares, and green spaces totaling about 11,000 acres, and is one of the largest landscaped urban park systems in the world. In City in a Park, James McClelland and Lynn Miller provide an affectionate and comprehensive history of this 200-year-old network of parks.

Originated in the nineteenth century as a civic effort to provide a clean water supply to Philadelphia, Fairmount Park also furnished public pleasure grounds for boat races and hiking, among other activities. Millions travel to the city to view its eighteenth-century villas, attend boat races on the Schuylkill River, hike the Wissahickon Creek, visit the Philadelphia Zoo, hear concerts in summer, stroll the city’s historic squares and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and enjoy its enormous collection of public art. Green initiatives flower today; Philadelphia lives amidst its parks.

James McClelland is a freelance writer whose work focuses on the arts. He is Executive Director Emeritus of the Philadelphia Art Alliance and the author of The Martinos: A Legacy of Art and Fountains of Philadelphia: A Guide.

Lynn Miller is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Temple University. He is the author of Global Order: Values and Power in International Politics and Crossing the Line (a novel), and the co-author (with Annette H. Emgarth) of French Philadelphia: The French Cultural & Historical Presence in the Delaware Valley.

Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell—nickname of Friedemann Paul Erhardt, America’s first TV showman chef. Big on personality and flavor, Chef Tell was once called by Philadelphia magazine the “affably roguish Bad Boy of the Philadelphia restaurant world.” Chef Tell explores how a young German American chef became America’s biggest TV celebrity chef of his time. Most of Chef Tell’s forty million baby boomer viewers—a number comparable to Julia Child’s—never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story. Until now.

This winning biography brings us “behind the line” into his kitchen and into his, at times, turbulent personal life. Tell was known as a charmer, as he worked the audience for live television shows, but also a quick-witted perfectionist, who demanded only the freshest ingredients for his life of food, fame, fortune, and women.

Chef Tell’s life—his colleagues would agree—was a managed, complicated, and mercurial affair, which changed two industries and millions of home cooks.

Ronald Joseph Kule, born in Bogota, Colombia, attended Oakland University and later worked independently in sales for fourty-eight years. His sales-training Manual, Sell Better, sell Easier, Sell Anything Artfully, is sold internationally. A published poet and short-story author, he has also authored several additional books. He lives in Clearwater, Florida.

Chef Walter Staib is a German American chef and restauranteur. He has authored several cookbooks and made numerous appearances on the Food Network’s Best Think I Ever Ate and Iron Chef. He currently hosts the PBS show A Taste of History.

Before the heyday of the Food Network, there was Chef Tell—nickname of Friedemann Paul Erhardt, America’s first TV showman chef. Big on personality and flavor, Chef Tell was once called by Philadelphia magazine the “affably roguish Bad Boy of the Philadelphia restaurant world.” Chef Tell explores how a young German American chef became America’s biggest TV celebrity chef of his time. Most of Chef Tell’s forty million baby boomer viewers—a number comparable to Julia Child’s—never knew his fascinating, hardscrabble life story. Until now.

This winning biography brings us “behind the line” into his kitchen and into his, at times, turbulent personal life. Tell was known as a charmer, as he worked the audience for live television shows, but also a quick-witted perfectionist, who demanded only the freshest ingredients for his life of food, fame, fortune, and women.

Chef Tell’s life—his colleagues would agree—was a managed, complicated, and mercurial affair, which changed two industries and millions of home cooks.

Ronald Joseph Kule, born in Bogota, Colombia, attended Oakland University and later worked independently in sales for fourty-eight years. His sales-training Manual, Sell Better, sell Easier, Sell Anything Artfully, is sold internationally. A published poet and short-story author, he has also authored several additional books. He lives in Clearwater, Florida.

Chef Walter Staib is a German American chef and restauranteur. He has authored several cookbooks and made numerous appearances on the Food Network’s Best Think I Ever Ate and Iron Chef. He currently hosts the PBS show A Taste of History.

Camp William Penn was the largest and first Civil War facility to exclusively train Northern-based federal black soldiers during the war. It was located in Chelten Hills just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the 19th-century’s epicenter of the Underground Railroad. Boasting the biggest free-black population in the country, Philadelphia and Camp William Penn, hosted the greatest anti-slavery abolitionists and Underground Railroad of that century, including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Robert Purvis and William Still. Douglass and Tubman spoke to and rallied some of the almost 11,000 soldiers, many of them runaway or ex-slaves, who trained in eleven regiments that fought in a slew of major battles, helped to corner the Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his Rebel forces, as well as capture President Lincoln’s assassins. Several earned the Medal of Honor for their bravery, and many gave their lives. At a time when America’s very existence was threatened, the warriors and freedom fighters for human equality associated with Camp William Penn were a major part of the country’s salvation. The complete story is told here

Donald “Ogbewii” Scott, a history columnist for the Journal-Register Co. and an assistant professor of English at the Community College of Philadelphia, has written two history books focusing on Camp William Penn, as well as the history of the township where he resides: Cheltenham, a northwest suburb of Philadelphia, PA.

“Buchanan Dying” is a work of historical fiction. To the list of John Updike’s well-intentioned protagonists—Rabbit Angstrom, Richard Maple, Henry Bech—add James Buchanan, the harried fifteenth president of the United States (1857–1861). In what the author calls “a kind of novel, conceived in the form of a play,” Buchanan’s political and private lives are represented as aspects of his spiritual life, whose crowning, condensing act is the act of dying. This definitive edition includes a Foreword by Updike, discussing early productions of the work, the historical context in which it was written, and its kinship to his later novel Memories of the Ford Administration. A wide-ranging Afterword fleshes out this dramatic portrait of one of America’s lesser known, and least appreciated, leaders.

John Updike was the author of more than sixty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have been honored with the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Hugging the Shore, an earlier collection of essays and reviews, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. He died in January 2009.

Nestled among picturesque rolling hills, the Brandywine River winds from southeastern Pennsylvania into Delaware. The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait is the first book to trace the rich vein of history in the region, from original European settlement to the Battle of the Brandywine—the largest land battle of the Revolutionary War—to the establishment of First State National Monument on its banks in 2013.

Acclaimed writer and Brandywine Valley resident W. Barksdale Maynard crafts a sweeping narrative about the men and women who shaped the Brandywine's history and culture. They include the du Ponts, who made their fortunes from gunpowder, and artist Howard Pyle, a native of the region, whose Brandywine School of American illustration took its inspiration from the pastoral environment. Most famously, the Brandywine Valley is where N. C. and Andrew Wyeth, father and son, painted amidst evocative landscapes for more than a century. With its unparalleled collection of museums and public gardens, including Longwood, Winterthur, and Hagley, the Brandywine continues to attract millions of visitors from around the world.

Richly illustrated with seldom-seen historical photographs, paintings, and drawings, The Brandywinevividly captures the spirit of a storied region that has inspired generations.

W. Barksdale Maynard is a lecturer at Princeton University and author of six books, including the award-winning Walden Pond: A History.

Nestled among picturesque rolling hills, the Brandywine River winds from southeastern Pennsylvania into Delaware. The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait is the first book to trace the rich vein of history in the region, from original European settlement to the Battle of the Brandywine—the largest land battle of the Revolutionary War—to the establishment of First State National Monument on its banks in 2013.

Acclaimed writer and Brandywine Valley resident W. Barksdale Maynard crafts a sweeping narrative about the men and women who shaped the Brandywine's history and culture. They include the du Ponts, who made their fortunes from gunpowder, and artist Howard Pyle, a native of the region, whose Brandywine School of American illustration took its inspiration from the pastoral environment. Most famously, the Brandywine Valley is where N. C. and Andrew Wyeth, father and son, painted amidst evocative landscapes for more than a century. With its unparalleled collection of museums and public gardens, including Longwood, Winterthur, and Hagley, the Brandywine continues to attract millions of visitors from around the world.

Richly illustrated with seldom-seen historical photographs, paintings, and drawings, The Brandywinevividly captures the spirit of a storied region that has inspired generations.

W. Barksdale Maynard is a lecturer at Princeton University and author of six books, including the award-winning Walden Pond: A History.

Brandywine Creek calmly meanders through the Pennsylvania countryside today, but on September 11, 1777, it served as the scenic backdrop for the largest battle of the American Revolution, one that encompassed more troops over more land than any combat fought on American soil until the Civil War. Long overshadowed by the stunning American victory at Saratoga, the complex British campaign that defeated George Washington’s colonial army and led to the capture of the capital city of Philadelphia was one of the most important military events of the war. Michael C. Harris’s impressive Brandywine: A Military History of the Battle that Lost Philadelphia but Saved America, September 11, 1777, is the first full-length study of this pivotal engagement in many years.

Michael C. Harris is a graduate of the University of Mary Washington and the American Military University. He has worked for the National Park Service in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Fort Mott State Park in New Jersey, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission at Brandywine Battlefield. He has conducted tours and staff rides of many east coast battlefields. Michael is certified in secondary education and currently teaches in the Philadelphia region. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Michelle and son Nathanael.

On July 9, 1755, British regulars and American colonial troops under the command of General Edward Braddock, commander in chief of the British Army in North America, were attacked by French and Native American forces shortly after crossing the Monongahela River and while making their way to besiege Fort Duquesne in the Ohio Valley, a few miles from what is now Pittsburgh. The long line of red-coated troops struggled to maintain cohesion and discipline as Indian warriors quickly outflanked them and used the dense cover of the woods to masterful and lethal effect. Within hours, a powerful British army was routed, its commander mortally wounded, and two-thirds of its forces casualties in one the worst disasters in military history.

David Preston is the Westvaco Professor of National Security Studies at the Citadel. He is the author of The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667-1783.

Black Citymakers revisits the Black Seventh Ward, documenting a century of banking and tenement collapses, housing activism, black-led anti-urban renewal mobilization, and post-Civil Rights political change from the perspective of the Black Seventh Warders. Drawing on historical, political, and sociological research, Marcus Hunter argues that black Philadelphians were by no means mere casualties of the large scale social and political changes that altered urban dynamics across the nation after World War II. Instead, Hunter shows that black Americans framed their own understandings of urban social change, forging dynamic inter- and intra-racial alliances that allowed them to shape their own migration from the old Black Seventh Ward to emergent black urban enclaves throughout Philadelphia. These Philadelphians were not victims forced from their homes - they were citymakers and agents of urban change.

Marcus Anthony Hunter is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles.