amcorbin's review
5.0
Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes--
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses!
-James Oppenheimer*
This isn't five stars like [b:Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983|980153|Holding the Line Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983|Barbara Kingsolver|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1266687808s/980153.jpg|818373] was, in its compulsive readability and way it got me fired up, but it's a five-star book for me nonetheless. I'd maybe knock it down a bit for the end, but overall, it's a great, detailed, amazingly-researched look at a crucial strike in labor history. And Watson does have some lovely passages of description and scene-setting in the Lawrence of 1912.
Watson does a good job lining up the situation leading into 1912, and every time a crucial figure makes their first appearance, he steps back and takes his time really letting you get to know the person -- which I loved. I knew a lot of them anyway, but there was almost always something new to me, or a shifted perspective. Even smaller figures, who maybe didn't go on to notoriety or national importance, get some attention.
There's also a lot of good discussion of the way the Lawrence strike was viewed for many years, and why (thanks, middle-class "concerned citizens" trying to preserve your town's "good name"!); Watson also talked about media spins in regards to the strike, not just in local papers, but in national press, and how reporters also behaved while covering the strike (as best he could tell). And he put it into context, too, by describing details of daily life and society at the time, such as the number of daily newspapers in Boston versus Lawrence -- the kind of thing that's always incredibly helpful when reading about a setting removed from your own.
The ending was satisfying in some ways -- seeing the end of the strike! The result of the Ettor/Giovanetti trial! The successes! The aftermath! -- and less satisfying in others. Namely, the timeline sped up drastically, summer came and went invisibly, and the last chapter was a little jarring. But I loved that Watson gave time in the epilogue to talk about what happened to each major figure after the strike, and some labor history in the aftermath of Lawrence.
Anyway, I liked it, made a lot of notes.
*Okay, so as this very book points out, the idea that this poem was written for the Lawrence strike is incorrect, a myth, a legend, as it was published in December 1911, but hey -- I like a good myth. No one knows quite why Bread and Roses got connected to the Lawrence strike, but it's got such a nice ring to it. Some strike should have it.
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