Last call : the rise and fall of Prohibition / Daniel Okrent.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Okrent, Daniel, 1948-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prohibition--United States.

Prohibition.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages.

History.

United States.

Drinking of alcoholic beverages--United States--History--20th century.

United States--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

viii, 468 pages,24 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Edition:

First Scribner hardcover edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Scribner, 2010.

Summary:

Last Call is Daniel Okrent's bestselling and brilliant history of America's most puzzling era, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America's favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages.

Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing power of the woman suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town Protestants that they were losing their country to immigrants; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and other factors ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax.

Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkable lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call's rich narrative runs through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between the sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing "sacramental" wine; New England fishing communities that switched to more lucrative rum-running; and the halls of Congress, where politicians who had voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology.

Last Call is peopled with vivid characters of an astonishing variety, including Susan B. Anthony, Billy Sunday, bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont, Meyer Lansky, and the incredible-if long-forgotten-federal official Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the most powerful woman in the country at the time.

Universally hailed by critics, Last Call stands as the most complete-and compelling-history of Prohibition ever written. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I The Struggle 5

1 Thunderous Drams and Protestant Nuns 7

2 The Rising of Liquid Bread 24

3 The Most Remarkable Movement 35

4 "Open Fire on the Enemy" 53

5 Triumphant Failure 67

6 Dry-Drys, Wet-Drys, and Hyphens 83

7 From Magna Carta to Volstead 96

Part II The Flood 115

8 Starting Line 117

9 A Fabulous Sweepstakes 128

10 Leaks in the Dotted Line 146

11 The Great Whiskey Way 159

12 Blessed Be the Fruit of the Vine 174

13 The Alcohol That Got Away 193

14 The Way We Drank 205

Part III The War of The Wet and the Dry 225

15 Open Wounds 227

16 "Escaped on Payment of Money" 247

17 Crime Pays 261

18 The Phony Referendum 289

Part IV The Beginning of the End, the End, and After 311

19 Outrageous Excess 313

20 The Hummingbird That Went to Mars 329

21 Afterlives, and the Missing Man 355.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Nichols fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9780743277020

9780743277044

9781439171691