Compelling, in-depth look at a tragedy that deserves to be better remembered. (8-page b&w insert, not seen)
A vivid recounting of the 1911 blaze that until the World Trade Center attack was the worst workplace disaster in New York history.
On March 25 of that year, a fire broke out at the Triangle Waist Company in Greenwich Village. In a half-hour, 146 people were killed, 123 of them women. Washington Post journalist Drehle (Among the Lowest of the Dead, 1995) fleshes out the social and political background to the conditions that made the tragedy inevitable. Abysmal pay and harassment for petty work violations had prompted a massive waist-workers’ strike in New York the year before. Nor was the fire unusual or unforeseen; one historian estimated that at the time, a hundred accidents occurred in American workplaces each day. The largest blouse-making operation in New York, the Triangle sweatshop employed 500 or more workers, mostly Jewish and Italian, who toiled on the upper floors just beyond the reach of fire department ladders. The victims’ doom was sealed when a rickety fire escape collapsed, and they couldn’t open a door kept locked because the owners feared employee theft. Though the owners were acquitted of manslaughter charges, the outrage that swept the city led to changes in laws concerning workplace safety and the rights of labor. Reaction to the Triangle disaster also foreshadowed a national political realignment as urban Democrats became the shock troops of FDR’s coalition. Drehle enhances his narrative with colorful portraits of principal players, including flamboyant defense attorney Max Steuer; Charles Whitman, the politically ambitious district attorney of New York; Tammany Hall boss Charles Murphy; and his Albany lieutenants Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner, who staved off socialist insurgency by passing 25 workplace safety bills in 1912. More remarkably, the author manages to piece together from news accounts and a long-lost trial transcript the lives and aspirations of the accident’s victims.
Compelling, in-depth look at a tragedy that deserves to be better remembered. (8-page b&w insert, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-874-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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