One of the great things about having a friend who is a producer for NPR is that when you go to visit her at the office you inevitably walk out with your arms full of books. Books that haven't even hit the bookstores yet.

Every day in radio/tv land, hundreds of books and cds arrive in the hopes they will get featured on a show. They fill carts and overflow off tables into piles that the jaded radio/tv people look at as so much guff getting in their way. Me, of course, I'm like an ex-con standing in a jewlery store in the midst of a citywide blackout. I cannot fill my bags fast enough.

Last weekend one of the books that came home with me was not a new release, but a paperback version of Triangle, The Fire that Changed America, by David Von Drehle.

Being the utterly slow and dull-witted child that I am, it only occurred to me as I was finishing it on Friday night the reason it was being recirculated: Labor Day. Don't ever say I didn't warn you about my obliviousness. Hello, my name is Oblivia. Oblivia Ungrateful Wretch.

There are about six books on my nightstand right now. I'm not sure how this one got ahead in line, but once I started reading, I could not stop. All of my whining and kvetching of the past few months appalled me. Sickened me. The deeper I got into the book the deeper my shame and the greater my appreciation of all that I have. My god. I was "struggling" this summer? I wouldn't know what struggle is if it landed on my head like a fucking anvil.

Here's an excerpt from the first chapter, "Late summer in those days was almost unbearable for the poor in New York. 'It sizzles in the neighborhood of Hester Street on a sultry day,' a magazine writer summed up simply. Swampy and feverish, the heat soaked into the stone and iron of the city by day and leaked out again by night, so that it was never gone but was just ebbing and surging like a simmering tide. Heat amplified the smells, the ovverripe scent of sweaty humans lacking adequate plumbing, the sickly sweet pungency of baking garbage, the sour-earth odor of wet manure from the countless horses pulling the wagons of the city's insatiable commerce.

So many people in so little space: eight hundred per acre in some city blocks. . . . Late summer was the season of exhausted women with sweat running in streams down their necks and noses, dripping from tendrils of upswept hair, women bent over steaming tubs of water to scrub the grime from the tablecloths, and from the dirty white workshirts of their husbands and sons and brothers, and from their own white aprons and their light cotton shirtwaists. Beside them, inches away, fires roared in coal stoves to heat the irons and warm the starch. Scrub. Rinse. Scrub again. Then the bluing solution, the starch, the isometric muscle strain of wringing the laundry dry. After the hot irons, a day or two later, the grime was back."

What Von Drehle does so spectacularly in this book is that he sets an event into a context so carefully and expertly drawn that images and experiences are seared into your mind. The event is a horrific fire at a shirtwaist factory that killed hundreds, mostly young women. The context is a growing movement to change labor laws against unbelievable odds. The courage and heroism and resiliency of women as they are beaten, harrassed by police, and sent to vile workhouses as if they were criminals on no legal grounds whatsoever astounds me.

Maybe there are those of you who know this story in depth, but if you don't, I urge you to read this book. Why these aren't the stories told in films, I don't know. Why do we have fuckheads making films about asteroids crashing into the planet when we have real true stories of agony, bravery and a deadly Davey vs Goliath fight right here in our own annals?

Thank you Clara Lemlich, Alva Belmont, Frances Perkins . . .the list is so long. Thank you all.

Happy Labor Day.

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