Author: David von Drehle
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 080214151X
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Triangle: The Fire That Changed America
by: David von Drehle

Editorial Review:

On a beautiful spring day, March 25, 1911, workers were preparing to leave the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village when a fire started. Within minutes it consumed the building's upper three stories. Firemen who arrived at the scene were unable to rescue those trapped inside. The final toll was 146--123 of them women. It was the worst disaster in New York City history until September 11, 2001. Harrowing yet compulsively readable, Triangle is both a chronicle of the fire and a vibrant portrait of an entire age. Waves of Jewish and Italian immigrants inundated New York in the early years of the century, filling its slums and supplying its garment factories with cheap, mostly female labor. Protesting their Dickensian work conditions, forty thousand women bravely participated in a massive shirtwaist workers' strike that brought together an unlikely coalition of socialists, socialites, and suffragettes. Von Drehle orchestrates these events into a drama rich in suspense and filled with memorable characters. Most powerfully, he puts a human face on the men and women who died, and shows how the fire dramatically transformed politics and gave rise to urban liberalism.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

All the Angles:

Had heard of the "Triangle Fire" all my life and knew basically what it was about - that poor immigrants were working to make shirts in building in New York which caught fire and many of them died - David Von Drehle gives us every angle of what caused the fire as well as the social and political problems of the era. The issues of women's suffrage and the unions added much to round out just what was going on in the early 1900's in America and how the tragic fire may at least contributed to some changes. The... more info

Powerful book about an American tragedy:

This book that chronicles the famous 1911 factory fire does a wonderful job of not only layering the reasons for the climate that allowed the fire to happen to build a powerful foundation, but also gives a terrific view of turn of the century New York City. Various forces such as the Gibson Girl, Russian progroms, Tammany Hall, and an eruption of Mt Vesuvius all brought the right conditions into play. Shirtwaists, what we would now call a woman's blouse, were popularized by Charles Dana Gibson in his Gibson... more info

A thorough and fascinating look into an American tragedy:

An avid reader of historical fiction and nonfiction, I found "Triangle" an engrossing read. The author skillfully combines facts about the tragic day of the fire itself, along with personal narratives about the individuals involved and background information about early twentieth-century immigrant and factory life in New York City.
Von Drehle manages to achieve the perfect blend, neither bogging his writing down with dry facts nor an overwhelming of emotion about the terrible loss of young life.... more info

Well written and well researched:

Author David Von Drehle approached this book from an interesting perspective, by analyzing the impact the fire had on the New York Political Machine at the time, Tammany Hall. I had heard about the fire from high school history class but knew very little about the machine politics that dominated 19th and early 20th century America. At the beginning of the book, the Beating of Clara Lemlich, Tammany supports the factory owners by endorsing and even taking part in such strong arm anti-union tactics as the... more info

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