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107 of 112 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intoxicating View Regarding The Implementation and Repeal of Prohibition, May 10, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This is an all-encompassing view of what lead up to the creation of the 18th ammendment(and its earliest roots which went back pretty far in american history) and its eventual downfall and lightening fast repeal.
I chose this book as a Vine selection because it sounded as though it went beyond the common perception of bathtub gin, speakeasies, and G-men in a Warner Bros. movie smashing trucks full of beer kegs. In fact, it did go way beyond that. Daniel Okrent's book is a lively source of all things Prohibition. He provides a rather in-depth history of how special interest groups such as the KKK and church groups and people such as Billy Sunday, Wayne Wheeler and Carrie Nation banded together to popularize the idea of prohibition and how the concept picked up steam politically via lobbying to enforce a law nationally that the public at large really didn't support. The book discusses the key players nationally who supported and also opposed this bill and provided background material/biographies of these people. The implementation of the bill as well as the go-arounds such as bootleg booze and speakeasies are discussed, and the reader is supplied with information regarding how this stuff (some of which proving quite toxic) was made. Also discussed is the general public disatisfaction with the bill and the reasons for its rapid decline/downfall in depression-era America.
One of the things I particularly liked (and possibly even loved) were some of the unexpected little gems such as the way alcoholic beverages were marketed to a pre-prohibition public, the background information on some of the beer barons and distillers and how they rode out the 'dry' spell. Of particular interest was the way in which the ordinary lives of the american people were changed. New products appeared on store shelves and near beers appeared (but had to be carefully marketed to avoid violation of the specific terms spelled out legally). Home winemaking became more popular. I also appreciated the extreme footnoting and indexing which referred back to specific portions of the ammendment and its execution.
The promotional information provided with my advance copy said this book would be the basis of a Ken Burns series on Prohibition. While reading this book, I kept that in mind. My greatest praise for this book is that I could see how easily the book could be transitioned and how a series would be as enjoyable a viewing experience as reading this book has been. In spite of the language used (you may need a dictionary to decipher some of the words that are no longer in common usage)this book isn't as dry as its topic suggests. It is very easy to read, yet thought provoking.
LAST CALL in general terms is an interesting look at Prohibition from multiple perspectives. I think it would particularly interesting to anyone who is into history, constitutional law, depression-era politics, political lobbying, advertising, special interest groups, or womens rights.
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91 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
For shame, Okrent -disguising a profound analysis of American culture as a wonderfully readable, fascinating and amusing book, May 17, 2010
This book masquerades as a book full of great stories and wonderful personalities - some well known, some utterly new - told with effortless wit at a pace that makes you keep breaking promises to yourself: "I'll read just ONE more chapter, before ...." {you fill in the blank: going to bed, making love on your wedding night, speaking before the UN General Assembly, surrendering to serve your term at Allentown).
But the mean thing about this book is that it also tells the whole story of prohibition, weaving together its emergence from various social, ethnic, political and religious roots, showing its connection to the great themes of the twentieth century, how prohibition was advanced by an alliance between what we would describe today as doctrinaire progressives, left-wing feminists and the religious right, and furnishing a social history of the West in the 19th, 20th and no doubt 21st centuries which more profoundly explains where we are and how we got here than many a more pretentious tome. It's just marvelous and will keep you thinking about it long after you've finally made your speech, formalized your wedding, served your time.
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115 of 129 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An entertaining story of a transforming adventure in folly, May 13, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Prohibition was the best of intentions; it was the worst of results. A burning passion to cure the world of intoxication begat a wildfire of unintended consequences that permanently changed the American political landscape like no event since the civil war. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution--the first to curtail rather than to protect liberty--was imposed in a bipartisan political landslide of moral fervor led by fiery evangelicals bent on saving Americans from Demon Rum: an idea that had gathered 60 years of steam & brimstone, and whose time had finally come. Prohibition also created powerful new constituencies that profited from its continuance. Even its detractors became hopelessly resigned to its permanence.
It was not a revolution made led by dull people. The morally excited are, for all their dryness (pun intended), more animated, more colorful than the skeptical or the wise. Here the dramatis personnae of this tragicomedy seem more than merely memorable, they come to life on the page. But even in the limelight of the author's wit, prohibitionists don't seem caricatured, uneducated or stupid. (How could they have known? The lessons of hindsight were waiting offstage.) The complex tale of their successful constitutional coup is chronicled here in far more complex depth and detail than you might expect, yet the narrative flows quickly among the actors and events without losing momentum. The avalanche of startling facts and grotesque statistics are leavened with enough really good writing to yield laugh-out-loud descriptions, outrageous quotes and incisive commentary. Along with familiar folks like Rev. Billy Sunday, Carrie Nation, Andrew Volstead, et.al., Daniel Okrent introduces us to the forgotten workaholics who engineered this disastrous triumph of prescriptive moralizing.
Not all the consequences of prohibition were unforeseen. Anti-booze activists were instrumental in passing the 16th Amendment in 1913 authorizing a federal income tax in anticipation of the end of alcohol taxes--then the federal government's 2nd largest revenue source (after tariff duties). The bulldog fixation on winning and keeping the prohibition prize created all sorts of odd bedfellows: suffragettes and Ku Klux Klansmen, Boston puritans and rural sharecroppers, and later on, the bootleggers and prosecutors, smugglers and judges. When prohibition finally arrived, it rode in on the coattails the anti-German hysteria of World War One: most of the nation's brewers had Germanic surnames. Widespread anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic sentiments had heavily fertilized the grass roots of the cause.
And so this catastrophically bad idea was made law by a lopsided legislative majority representing a demographic minority. The the constitutionally mandated congressional reapportionment to reflect the 1920 census was deliberately (and illegally) delayed 8 years to keep that majority intact. But nothing could prevent the unprecedented mass civil disobedience which followed prohibition's victory. The Twenties roared because all liquor laws (save the infamous Volstead Act) had been effectively swept away. Once the fruit was forbidden, it quickly became glamorous, accessible, and demand exploded. With the flotilla of smugglers, an army of bootleggers, and dense constellations of speakeasies came a flood tide of corruption that inundated nearly every police precinct, courtroom, and customs house in the nation. New fault lines appeared: civil service laws were bypassed to give the Anti-Saloon League control of federal liquor enforcement hiring, but state legislatures and local officials were often uncooperative (or obstructive) for a variety of reasons.
To prosecute so many millions of victimless crimes would have bankrupted America in a month. So the token fine and a metastasizing culture of bribery soon replaced enforcement. The profits of crime ballooned. Al Capone is alleged to have made $60 million in a single year. Soon the Klan would be deputized to terrorize moonshiners--and all too predictably, others. Later, Congress would pass the Jones Act "get tough" and "send a message"--like life imprisonment for repeat moonshine sellers. Sound familiar? Wood alcohol, isopropyl alcohol, and even deadlier intoxicants became common bootleg additives. The phrase "blind drunk" originated in prohibition. A neuropathic chemical pollutant would permanently cripple some 500 tipplers in Wichita. (The vindictive crocodile tears of sympathy would be echoed by defenders of Paraquat in the 1980s).
Even economics becomes mesmerizing as legally "dry" America experiences skyrocketing commodity prices for the ingredients of fermentation and the nation's residential cellars (and even bathtubs) are converted to forbidden production. But the irritations and absurdities of alcohol criminalization evolved slowly into political outrage, and like it's entry, prohibition's exit was kicked forward by the hard boot of circumstance: the stock market crash of 1929 and the the Great Depression. That it was overthrown so unexpectedly and so decisively is another part of a tale well worth telling, and in Daniel Okrent's "Last Call" it is wonderfully told. Almost none of this rollicking history is spent on prohibition's moral lessons or drawing parallels to the War on Drugs. They're just too obvious. If you've recently been bored by history books that don't hold your interest, this may be the kind of fun reading you''ve been waiting for.
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