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Drehle, David Von ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
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TRIANGLE: THE FIRE THAT CHANGED AMERICA
Drehle, David Von
2003 42249 On March 25, 1911, as workers were getting ready to leave for the day, a fire broke out in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village. Within minutes it spread to consume the building's upper three stories. With ladders too short for a rescue, firemen had to watch in horror, along with hundreds on the street, as desperate workers jumped to their deaths. The final toll was 146 people-123 of them women. It was the worst industrial disaster in New York City history until 9/11. From The Critics The New York Times For a historian of New York, the dreadful sight of trapped World Trade Center workers leaping to their deaths on Sept. 11 summoned up the horrible image of trapped seamstresses, hair and clothing ablaze, plunging from the Triangle shirtwaist factory on March 25, 1911. David Von Drehle was at work on Triangle: The Fire That Changed America when the attack came, and for a time its appalling parallels stopped him cold. We can be thankful that he carried on, because he has given us an enthralling chronicle of that distant and very different disaster, which left its own profound mark on the city and taught lessons that we are badly in need of remembering. - Mike Wallace The Washington Post Von Drehle ably describes the growth of the garment industry, the lives of its immigrant work force, the politics of early 20th-century New York, and the 1909 strike. But he truly excels in telling the harrowing story of the fire itself. Two gripping chapters put the reader inside the Triangle factory, as the fire spreads with awesome speed from the pile of garment scraps where it began, taking all its victims within just a half-hour. Von Drehle shows how clear thinking, decisive action, physical strength and luck saved many, including the owners, while others were doomed by paralyzing terror, trying to save colleagues, a locked exit door, the poorly constructed fire escape that collapsed during the inferno, or sheer chance. Von Drehle's reconstruction of the fire is reminiscent of Norman McClean's Young Men and Fire, the classic account of what it is like to face a raging fire, and the split-second events that separate life from death. - Joshua B. Freeman NY Times Sunday Book Review As David Von Drehle makes clear in his outstanding history, Triangle, the overwhelmingly young, female victims of the fire -- at least 123 were women, and of these at least 64 were teenagers -- were betrayed by the greed of their employers, by the indifference of the city's political bosses, by an entire matrix of civic neglect and corruption. … Von Drehle, a reporter at The Washington Post, has written what is sure to become the definitive account of the fire. - Kevin Baker Publishers Weekly It was a profitable business in a modern fireproof building heralded as a model of efficiency. Yet the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City became the deadliest workplace in American history when fire broke out on the premises on March 25, 1911. Within about 15 minutes the blaze killed 146 workers-most of them immigrant Jewish and Italian women in their teens and early 20s. Though most workers on the eighth and 10th floors escaped, those on the ninth floor were trapped behind a locked exit door. As the inferno spread, the trapped workers either burned to death inside the building or jumped to their deaths on the sidewalk below. Journalist Von Drehle (Lowest of the Dead: Inside Death Row and Deadlock: The Inside Story of America's Closest Election) recounts the disaster-the worst in New York City until September 11, 2001-in passionate detail. He explains the sociopolitical context in which the fire occurred and the subsequent successful push for industry reforms, but is at his best in his moment-by-moment account of the fire. He describes heaps of bodies on the sidewalk, rows of coffins at the makeshift morgue where relatives identified charred bodies by jewelry or other items, and the scandalous manslaughter trial at...... Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 0871138743 / 9780871138743
Hardcover New Condition New York
Price:
22.28 USD
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