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jack_a_bean 's review for:
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America
by David von Drehle
4.5 Stars
This is a fascinating book on the triangle shirtwaist factory fire.... or more accurately, it's a fascinating book on the intricacies of the reforms that were stirring before the fire and played out after the fire. The fire itself, while covered in precise and exciting, if not horrific, detail, isn't the center stage of the story. The effects of said fire are.
The author explains the events that occurred before the fire: strikes for labor reforms like worker safety carried out by the same workers later killed by the fire, along with thousands of others, and the collapsing old Tammany machine of new york city to name a few. Effortlessly introducing new characters left and right, the author doesn't leave a perspective untold in this book. From rich millionaire suffragists to the owners of the factory, harris, and blanck, people are built into characters through just a few paragraphs on their origins. For someone with a lot of memory issues concerning names, this book is surprisingly easy to follow. Each person that plays any significant role in the story of the factory fire is easy to remember.
What I liked most about the book was the way that it was able to explain the motives, backgrounds, and futures of the characters and how those three things tied into the current story of the reforms and the fire, showing both why the fire happened and how it would affect those lives who were touched by it. But most importantly, seen from my use of the term character to describe real people, the people described in this book come alive for me.
However, what the author does brilliantly for each person mentioned, the author does poorly for the story as a whole. After the fire descriptions, the book wraps up very quickly. This might be due to the amount of context before the fire making detail about the later reforms unneeded, but those following reforms felt less detailed and developed than the rest of the book. It felt like the author was building context for something he ended up making a quick study of in the end. Instead, the author focused a little too much on the spectacle of the trial against harris and blanck.
tl;dr this book is definitely worth the read and is very well articulated and researched, especially since there aren't that many books about the fire on its own. However, it felt a little underdeveloped in areas, like the author either didn't have enough resources or didn't spend as much time researching.
This is a fascinating book on the triangle shirtwaist factory fire.... or more accurately, it's a fascinating book on the intricacies of the reforms that were stirring before the fire and played out after the fire. The fire itself, while covered in precise and exciting, if not horrific, detail, isn't the center stage of the story. The effects of said fire are.
The author explains the events that occurred before the fire: strikes for labor reforms like worker safety carried out by the same workers later killed by the fire, along with thousands of others, and the collapsing old Tammany machine of new york city to name a few. Effortlessly introducing new characters left and right, the author doesn't leave a perspective untold in this book. From rich millionaire suffragists to the owners of the factory, harris, and blanck, people are built into characters through just a few paragraphs on their origins. For someone with a lot of memory issues concerning names, this book is surprisingly easy to follow. Each person that plays any significant role in the story of the factory fire is easy to remember.
What I liked most about the book was the way that it was able to explain the motives, backgrounds, and futures of the characters and how those three things tied into the current story of the reforms and the fire, showing both why the fire happened and how it would affect those lives who were touched by it. But most importantly, seen from my use of the term character to describe real people, the people described in this book come alive for me.
However, what the author does brilliantly for each person mentioned, the author does poorly for the story as a whole. After the fire descriptions, the book wraps up very quickly. This might be due to the amount of context before the fire making detail about the later reforms unneeded, but those following reforms felt less detailed and developed than the rest of the book. It felt like the author was building context for something he ended up making a quick study of in the end. Instead, the author focused a little too much on the spectacle of the trial against harris and blanck.
tl;dr this book is definitely worth the read and is very well articulated and researched, especially since there aren't that many books about the fire on its own. However, it felt a little underdeveloped in areas, like the author either didn't have enough resources or didn't spend as much time researching.