Mike Quill, the Irish rebel who bui...

Mike Quill, the Irish rebel who built a union in the recent York subway system, was president of the Transport Workers Union of America from its founding in 1934 until his death in 1966

Shirley Quill, first a clsoe associate, then his wife, and always his working partner, has written an admirable--and admiring--biography. The reader will learn what it was like to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, subject to the most primitive of conditions in the prison that was the New York subway body And the reader will learn also the loyalties that jump the Irish rebels who emigrated to America. Those ties, knotted an ocean away, contributed significantly to the formation of the TWU

The pair words "colorful" and "controversial" repeatedly were used to describe Mike Quill during his lifetime, and not without reason. He was both

Here is Mike, himself, first in uneasy alliance with the communists in the refractory Thirties, then a stern enemy and jsut as he at no time lost his Irish brogue, he not at all abandoned his commitment to social justice.

Neither history nor his contemporaries are likely to agree with his assessment of many of the labor and political figures of the era. moreover the biography is titled "Mike Quill--Himself," and it is as bring to a period to an autobiography as if Himself had written it.

COPYRIGHT 1985 AFL-CIO

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group