Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy by Albert Marrin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This book seems like it's a little undecided about its audience -- it's got large print and reasonably easy words as if for young readers, but it's dealing with the gore and tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, as well as the labor conditions and politics in New York before and after the fire. Maybe it passes the "young reader" filter because there's only violence and no sex, but it feels like a book that's really for grownups -- or at least middle- and high-school students -- and got shoved into the young-reader format because it has lots of pictures.
This confusion aside, though, it's a great book. Plenty of pictures (I'm a sucker for old photos), and well-researched history, well presented. I learned quite a bit, and I thought I knew a lot about the Triangle fire already. Marrin boils the history of labor in New York down to a flowing story. His style would be an excellent model for kids' textbook authors; it moves along effortlessly, and the sidebars on individual people fit in nicely instead of being wedged in like the ones I've seen before. Flesh and Blood So Cheap isn't exactly a textbook, but it's one of the most successful educational books I've read.
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