Best Philly nonfiction books to gift this year
From the history of the Schuykill, to Black cowboys, history-correcting chronicles, and essays on friendship.
Looking for the perfect gift for the eclectic reader in your life? Give them a glimpse of Philadelphia, its people, and its past — captured in infamy, memory, and image. These recommendations come from Philly natives and transplants alike, drawn to the city’s rivers, dive bars, horses, and rich, endless history.
For the urban archaeologist
Recommended by: Sandy Sorlien, a former University of the Arts photography teacher, has been an educator at Fairmount Water Works for more than a decade. Her 2022 opus Inland: The Abandoned Canals of the Schuylkill Navigation photographs and documents what remains of the extraordinary 130-mile liquid highway (which will celebrate its Bicentennial in 2025) designed to float mountain-mined coal and other goods to Philadelphia’s docks.
Sorlein bushwhacked across five counties — Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia to photograph the lovely remnants: handbuilt landside walls, mitre gates, capstones, and other vestiges.
Holiday Season Rec: Riverman: An American Odyssey by Ben McGrath
Why: New Yorker staff writer Ben McGrath’s Riverman, Sorlien said, “brings to vivid life a singular eccentric Santa-like man, Dick Conant … [who] canoed the long rivers of America. At the start of the book, Conant has disappeared, so we get to know him through journals and the detailed recollections of everyone he met in [the] small towns along the banks or paddling along in his magnetic wake.”
Additional pick: The Long Ride Home: Black Cowboys in America by Ron Tarver
What she’s working on now: Researching and photographing for a website and potentially a book titled The Way Through. It’s about “historic transportation routes and geological wonders at tiny Port Clinton Borough in the Schuylkill Water Gap,” Sorlein said.
For those who want to gallop into the history of Black cowboys
Recommended by: Ron Tarver — Oklahoma-born descendant of Black cattlemen, former Inquirer photojournalist, and current Swarthmore College associate professor of art — is the author of The Long Ride Home Black Cowboys in America. As Solein points out, Tarver is the perfect person to “connect the Black cowboys of Philadelphia (familiar and amazing to us urban pioneers, glimpsing them on horseback in Spring Garden Street traffic) with those working and performing at ranches and rodeos in Texas and other points West.”
Holiday Season Rec: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies by Wendell A. White
Why: Copublished by Radius Books and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Manifest is the monograph companion to the museum’s ongoing Manifest: Thirteen Colonies exhibition (through April 13) and includes some text by Philadelphia-born Deborah Willis. This book constitutes, Tarver said, “a hauntingly beautiful journey of photographs told through objects found in libraries, museums, and cultural archives.”
Tarver has long been fascinated with White’s work, which uses selective focus to “produce images that appear to float through time on a sea of blackness.” The book, Tarver said, “is a keepsake that reaffirms Black power as well as racial oppression found in the nation’s public collations.”
What he’s working on now: Two exhibitions and potential books, including Shine, which exposes the ugliness of Black memorabilia as decorative art, and An Overdue Conversation with My Father, which reimagines the African American experience in the United States under Jim Crow, interpreted through the lens of his father, Richard Tarver.
For history aficionados demanding accurate updates
Recommended by: Andrew Sillen, a Rutgers University Department of Anthropology visiting research scholar, recently published a record-correcting chronicle, Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White. White was a free Black teenager employed on, and subsequently kidnapped from, the Philadelphia-based packet ship Tonawanda.
The book begins with painter Edouard Manet’s depiction of a (once) famous Civil War naval battle, The Battle of the USS “Kearsarge” and the CSS “Alabama,” which is in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and portraysboth the end of White’s 600 days of bondage and his death. Sillen’s book reexamines what happened to White aboard the Confederate ship Alabama in the interim.
Holiday Season Rec: The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson
Why: “A granular history of the period running up to the outbreak of the Civil War” with a “novel-like storytelling.” It “signals how the rhetoric and politics of the pre-Civil War period have important resonances and implications for contemporary politics.”
What he’s working on now: Returning to his academic research and digging into the South African early hominin site of Swartkrans. He is also developing a new edition of the 1955 book by his uncle, Samuel Sillen, Women Against Slavery, featuring vignettes of female abolitionists. Lastly, he’s reckoning with the unfinished manuscript by his mother, anthropologist Estelle Fuchs, , which describes a 1909 U.S. cavalry raid on the Navajo reservation “to arrest a traditional healer who would not send the children from his band to the U.S. B.I.A. boarding schools, where they were not allowed to speak Navajo.”
For readers reconciling reason and faith
Recommended by: Nina St. Pierre, a queer essayist and culture writer, moved to Philadelphia in 2014, where she “smok[ed] cigarettes in a Rittenhouse dive bar that sold 49-cent hotdogs from a lukewarm vat in the back” while earning her MFA in creative nonfiction from Rutgers University-Camden. Her debut book, Love is a Burning Thing, artfully plumbs her late mother’s complex entanglements with religion, mysticism, and mental illness.
Holiday Season Rec: First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger
Why: It’s about “friends as family. Not in a quaint BFFs-with-matching-necklaces sort of way, but in a true queering of what family means,” St. Pierre said. “It begins with a brutal story of Dancyger’s ‘first love,’ her cousin Sabina, who is murdered in Philadelphia walking home from a club. In it, she explores how that first loss drove her fierce commitment to friends and how they made a world for each other that was safe and soft in the face of grueling circumstances.”
What she’s working on now: An essay collection “about acoustics and how we hear each other (or not) in relationships” and a novel that she’s loosely calling “a psychospiritual intergenerational” story about “late 17th-century French colonialist women coming to Canada, the political ecology of maple syrup, and how one maternal lineage morphed from devout religiosity into madness.”