Mother Jones
A life touched by tragedy and deprivation—childhood in her native Ireland ending with the potato famine, immigration to Canada and then to the United States, marriage followed by the deaths of her husband and four children from yellow fever, and the destruction of her dressmaking business in the great Chicago fire of 1871—forged the stalwart labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones into a force to be reckoned with.\ Radicalized in a brutal era of repeated violence against hard-working men...
Search in google:
\ Publishers Weekly - Library Journal\ A key organizer in the early American union movement of the late 1800s, Mother Jones encouraged many groups of American workers to stand up for their rights in the face of larger-than-life foes like Carnegie and Rockefeller, becoming a powerful symbol in her own time as well as in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and '70s. Author and professor Cordery (British Friendly Societies, 1750-1918) has produced an exhaustive biography of Mary Harris Jones, drawn mostly from her own testimonials and primary source accounts of her work-which the activist-agitator didn't begin until her sixties. Cordery is quick not to take Jones's words at face value-her commitment was to the cause, not to truth-but his reportorial rigor takes a lot of steam out of the proceedings, making for a scandalously dry narrative about a figure central to some very interesting times. 22 b&w illus. \ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.\ \
