Rating: 
Summary: Leadership and Loss
Review: This book, only the second ever written on the second worst workplace fire in U.S. history, is a gripping and human tale. Especially of interest to those who are into Labor history, and valuable for many reasons, one of the most important being reminding the reader of the many heroes of that day, including Joseph Zito, the elevator operator who made many trips up and down the burning building saving many lives that horrible day.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating history
Review: This is a fascinating time in U.S. history. The Kheel Center at Cornell University has an amazing Internet site devoted to the Triangle Fire as well. And some of the women who worked at Triangle, including Pauline Newman, went on to become labor organizers. I am a middle school social studies teacher and recently found a wonderful book for older children and adults called SHUTTING OUT THE SKY LIFE IN THE TENEMENTS OF NEW YORK, which contains a section not only on the Triangle Fire, but on the daily lives of shirtwaist workers and their journeys from Europe to the Lower East Side.
Rating:
Summary: Thrilling and poignant history comes alive
Review: This is an excellent book! Well researched and wonderfully written. Von Drehle weaves many different threads together to create the world of the Triangle fire; immigrants and their home lands, the garment industry, New York bare knuckle politics, city and state, tenement housing, police, early union organizing and strikes, business owners, suffragettes, news coverage in the newspapers, neighborhoods, the courts, lawyers, and somehow he keeps bringing it all back to the Triangle. His account of the fire is agonizing and compelling at the same time and the way he balances the personal stories while presenting it all in a larger context of society then and now is quite an achievement. Even his Source Notes, when he describes his search for the trail transcripts keeps you intrigued. With fine writing/reporting like this who needs fiction! I will be reading more from this author.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent work of labor history
Review: This is one of the best history books I've read in quite a while. To understand the importance of the Triangle Waist Company fire in labor history, it is also important to understand the context in which it occurred. I hadn't realized how the rise and fall of Tammany Hall was so intimately tied in with a business and political climate that would permit a situation in which such a deadly fire could occur, and also with the reformist aftermath, which was instrumental in leading to New Deal policies. The story of the trial, and the political maneuvering leading up to it, was fascinating.
Von Drehle is a fine writer. The most moving chapter must be the one he calls, "Three Minutes", referring to the fact that had the alarm been sounded three minutes sooner, many lives might have been saved. His descriptions of how many of the workers died had me in tears. While it is very easy to pile horror on horror, von Drehle shows you the people, both the survivors and the lost. There is one extraordinary section of this chapter in which, after telling of the people standing in the windows "cry[ing] 'fire!' because what else was there to say?", and the fire ladders not tall enough, and the watchers below "their tiny hands . . . up, as if a gesture could hold the doomed workers forever in the mouth of a furnace" he then describes the view from the windows. "[T]he cool, clear air beyond the furnace; the gray-brown tracery of bare trees quilting Washington Square (faintly washed with the first whisper of new green) . . .the birds starting from nearby eaves and wheeling through the sky; the elegant campanile of the church on the square, and the pleasing aesthetic echoes of it in the two orange brick loft building that faced the Asch Building . . .one of the least decorated in the neighborhood, [it] featured miniature terra-cotta columns, fluted in the classical style, as dividers between the upper-floor windows. Workers were clinging to these decorations now."
In 1913, two years after the fire, the New York State legislature passed a series of fire safety laws, including requiring automatic sprinklers in high-rises, and unlocked doors. Last fall (2003), 6 people died in a high-rise office building in Chicago. There were no automatic sprinklers, and the victims were trapped in a stairwell because the fire doors were locked.
Rating: 
Summary: Reached peak early, then slowed down...
Review: This was one of those books I've had in mind for years to read, but never got around to it until now. I wanted not just to read the sensationalism surrounding this horrific tale. I have not made it a habit to read all the disaster books. I've probably read 4 or 5. I tend to stick with epidemiology and disease, such as the 1918 influenza pandemic. But I read about this disaster over 28 years ago, when I worked as a librarian and had to shelve the books dealing with this. I only got a glimpse, but as I read more history it became clear that this was a fire that changed much in the U.S., and I wanted to know why this one specifically had an impact.
The fire itself and the situation both politically and socially surrounding it, are the very things that made me shake my head when people bring up how 'good' the 'good old days' were. Yeah, right...so it was great having people working horrible jobs at outrageous risk to themselves was great, just like having measles, mumps, and rubella was great when there were no vaccines. Makes me want to smack a few heads together when I hear things like this...
Drehle does a fairly good job in hi writing. He is a journalist, and has the background and can do the research. I appreciate his putting a face on the people who would otherwise remain unreal to the readers. But it makes it more excruciating when those people actually die in what you know must have been an awful way to go.
The books slows down after the fire and the initial outrage. The part about the changes made in politics, in the urban planning, and in society should have been more important than they came across as being. There was no extension as to what impact the Triangle had nationally...just a hint really. We know it changed NY law; did it change fire laws for other cities? We know some politicians made a lot of political hay from this, and went on to impact national politics. But I would have liked to have known more about the national implications of this fire. Was it reported nationally? How was it reported? Did it make any of the other textile people sit up and take notice? How? What happened to the many involved in the fire (not just the bosses)? Were there any others who returned to work for these same men, or did they just leave?
I had a lot of questions left for which there were no answers...an interesting book, more than a great one.
Karen Sadler
Rating:
Summary: Major Error in book
Review: Triangle is an good read and would rate excellent but the author seems to have made a major mistake in his research. He has listed Ms Rose Freedman as one of the victims and even describes her death. Ms Freedman was the last survivor to die(15 February 2001)at the age of 107.
Rating: 
Summary: An Ideological Fire
Review: While an interesting and informative account of the times, the title of this book is a misnomer. The Triangle fire is merely an aside to the author's political and sociological agenda. Too little character development and the relatively small space alloted to the fire itself force the reader to become more involved with the "times" than the "event". For a more precise account of the actual Triangle fire, I, too, would refer readers to Leon Stein's "The Triangle Fire".
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