The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will provide readers with insights into our current...
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CHF 37.34
SKU: 9781620972380
Product Type: Books
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Author: Bryant Simon
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
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The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives by Simon, Bryant

The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

CHF 37.34

The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

CHF 37.34
Author: Bryant Simon
Format: Hardcover
Language: English

Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will provide readers with insights into our current national politics.
--The Washington Post

A gifted writer (Chicago Tribune) uses a long forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm

For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products. The company paid its workers a dollar above the minimum wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping gobs of fat off frozen chicken breasts before they got dipped in batter and fried into golden brown nuggets and tenders. If a worker complained about the heat or the cold or missed a shift to take care of their children or went to the bathroom too often they were fired. But they kept coming back to work because Hamlet was a place where jobs were scarce. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the day after Labor Day, this factory that had never been inspected burst into flame. Twenty-five people--many of whom were black women with children, living on their own--perished that day behind the plant's locked and bolted doors.

Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to local residents, state officials, and survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.



Author: Bryant Simon
Publisher: New Press
Published: 09/05/2017
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781620972380


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2017
Publishers Weekly 07/31/2017
Booklist 08/01/2017 pg. 17

About the Author
Bryant Simon is a professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, and Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks. His work and commentary have been featured in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the New Republic, and numerous other outlets. He lives in Philadelphia.

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