A review by hannahstohelit
Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David von Drehle

4.75

This book was EXCELLENT. Given my background in modern Jewish history I was quite familiar with the overall era but, as Von Drehle points out at the end, a lot of books about the overall era don't do a great job/go into much detail summing up and contextualizing the Triangle fire as its own thing and explaining its importance and I thought this did a fantastic job, both contextualizing lots of individual things I already knew and adding an angle I wasn't familiar with (the Tammany shift leftward) in a way that was fascinating and convincing. It also did a great job at giving context to the victims and their lives- though my .25 off is because, and this is totally subjective, I felt like I'd have loved to see more about the familial and communal mourning/responses to losses of the people who were killed, which felt like a bit of a lacuna besides for the mention of the mourning parade. I think it could have gone more into social history in general and given it more living detail. But again, that doesn't really detract from what is in this book which I thought was very effective.