Reviewed by Tara Lohan

It only took five or six minutes for the cigarette discarded in a bin of fabric scraps to blaze into a fire that consumed the 9,000-square foot room on the ninth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company on March 25, 1911. In the course of the fire, 146 employees lost their lives; 123 of them women and mostly Jewish immigrants.

In Triangle: The Fire that Changed the Nation, David Von Drehle provides a detailed account of the worst disaster in the history of New York City prior to 2001. Von Drehle takes a hundred pages to lead up to the fire and a hundred more after the event to provide a well-rounded account of not just the tragedy itself, but of the unsafe living and working conditions for immigrants in the city, the battles between labor unions and factory owners and the Irish-dominated political machine known as Tammany Hall.

Von Drehle gives as much detail about people too, such as Tammany politician Charles Murphy, union organizer and garment worker Clara Lemlich, and reformers and activists like Anne Morgan and Frances Perkins. The story is made painfully real with vivid detail of the Triangle employees who tried various routes to escape the fire as they found doors to the factory locked, and fire department ladders unable to reach them.

The book replaces sensationalism with historical accuracy in accounting the tragedy. Von Drehle’s only fault is in not bringing home the scope of the reforms and shifts in the political power structure that made the Triangle disaster a fire that truly changed the nation.