David von Drehle - Triangle: The Fire That Changed America

ACCOLADES FOR DAVID VON DREHLES TRIANGLE

New York Times Extended List Best Seller

New York Times Book Review Notable Book

Washington Post Book World Rave of the Year

New York Public Library Book of the Year

New York Society Library Book of the Year

Fresh Air Critics Top Book of 2003

Hadassah Top Ten Jewish Best Seller

ALA Notable Book of the Year

Winner of the 2004 Christopher Award

Winner of the 2004 Sidney Hillman Foundation Award

Amazon Top 50 Book of the Year

San Jose Mercury News Best Book

Rocky Mountain News Best Book

Providence Journal Critics Choice

Praise for Triangle:

There are many reasons to praise Von Drehles accomplishment. Von Drehle is interested in far more than the tragic events of a single afternoon... [he] has clearly immersed himself in the spirit and energy of a time long ago: the grimy, industrializing, electrifying years when colorful machine politicians battled socialists, suffragists and upright progressive reformers for the soul of an increasingly immigrant city.... Von Drehle has written a piece of popular history that reads like a novel and is rich in characterization and thoughtful analysis. It is a great introduction to the drama that was early-twentieth-century New York.

Annelise Orleck, Chicago Tribune

Urban history at its best: vivid, compelling, meticulously researched. It also provides heartening evidence... that great good can come from appalling tragedy.

Geoffrey Ward

Sure to become the definitive account of the fire. Von Drehle [shows] how revulsion over the fire led directly to legislation that was unmatched to that time in American history.

Kevin Baker, The New York Times Book Review

Von Drehles spellbinding and detailed reconstruction of the disaster is complemented by an equally gripping account of the factory owners subsequent manslaughter trial (they got off scot-free), drawing on court records he helped unearth.

Mike Wallace, The New York Times

Riveting... weaves the Triangle into its rightful historical place, emerging from the Eastern European Jewish experience in America to collide with the beginning of the Progressive Era... This story deserves a place as one of the most important chapters in the American Jewish experience.

Jo-Ann Mort, Forward

Von Drehles engrossing account, which emphasizes the humanity of the victims and the theme of social justice, brings one of the pivotal and most shocking episodes of American labor history to life.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

It is a powerful and cautionary tale, grippingly toldpopular history at its most compelling.

Michael Pakenham, The Baltimore Sun

Von Drehles gripping account of this legendary American tragedy is set against the vivid tapestry of immigrant life in New Yorks tenements and factories. It tells us the star-crossed stories of individual victims, some of whom had survived murderous pogroms in Czarist Russia only to die needlessly, still young, in a country that was capable of serving them better.

Martin Dyckman, St. Petersburg Times

Von Drehle re-creates this period with complete mastery.... Besides bringing many of these characters to life, Von Drehle shows how pivotal the fire proved to be in the history of labor unions and in the rise of urban liberalism.

John C. Ensslin, Rocky Mountain News

In a gripping, mind-numbing description of the horrific eventthe conditions leading up to it, what resulted from itWashington Post writer David Von Drehle describes the crucial moment in a potent chain of events, a chain that ultimately forced fundamental reforms from the political machinery of New York and, after New York, the whole nation.

Hadassah magazine

Superb social history... Chapters on the fire are so spellbinding that readers will need air at the end. Von Drehle painstakingly imagines the lives, motives and overseas passage of two teenagers who came to work at Triangle and died in the fireRosie Freedman of Poland and Michela Marciano of Italy.

Lyn Millner, USA Today

Behind the fire lay the extraordinary history of sweatshop labor and the fledgling beginnings of union organizing. The heart of Von Drehles book is its detailed, nuanced, mesmerizing description of the fire. The descriptions [of the trapped workers], woven into the cogent analysis,... leave a reader staring into space.

Vivian Gornick, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Von Drehle ably describes the growth of the garment industry, the lives of its immigrant workforce, the politics of early-twentieth-century New York, and the 1909 strike. But he truly excels in telling the harrowing story of the fire itself.

Joshua Freeman, The Washington Post

Von Drehles account of the Tammany transformation is a real contribution to a much neglected chapter of American history. The author shows how the activist workers in the garment sweatshops of Manhattan were as crucial to the progress of the period as the intellectuals who moved into Federal offices in Washington, D.C.

Gus Tyler, The New Leader

An amazing, long-forgotten tale. A riveting history written with flair and precision.

Bob Woodward

Terrific and troubling... Von Drehle demonstrates convincingly how the Triangle case produced major pieces of workplace safety legislation.... Meticulous research furnishes Triangle with the necessary historical authority.

Daniel Dyer, The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

Von Drehle attaches a name and where possible a story to every one of the Triangle Shirtwaist factorys victims. The biographical summaries provide the occasion for a reimagination of everyday life in the immigrants Lower East Side tenements.

Laurence Wieder, The Weekly Standard

Like the Titanic disaster that took place a year later, the Triangle fire contains all the melodrama needed to make a blockbuster Hollywood weepy. So its part of the triumph of Von Drehles book that while paying homage to the dead and the terror of their last moments... he also successfully urges us to look beyond the fire, which lasted a scant half-hour, to the larger political and social world the Triangle workers inhabited.... Gripping narrative history.

Maureen Corrigan on Fresh Air

Von Drehle has reconstructed with unprecedented care one of the formative events of twentieth-century America. He has managed to convert dry research into human drama by making us see how much burned in those flames.

Samuel Kauffman Anderson, The Christian Science Monitor

For more than thirty years, historians thought the transcripts lost, but in what is an extraordinary feat of investigative journalism, Von Drehle found them through a cryptic endnote in a biographical dictionary entry for Max D. Steuer, the defense attorney in the case.

Isabel Vincent, National Post

See Appendix.

TRIANGLE

Also from the same author

Among the Lowest of the Dead: Inside Death Row

THE FIRE THAT CHANGED AMERICA

David Von Drehle

for Karen

Copyright 2003 by David Von Drehle

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