A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America's most
puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was
amended to restrict one of Americas favorite pastimes: drinking
alcoholic beverages.

From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel
that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630
carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully
it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish
their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing.

Yet we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent's dazzling explanation of
why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an
unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives
of Americans changed the country forever.

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

Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkably creative
lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally)
imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call is peopled with vivid
characters of an astonishing variety: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Sunday,
William Jennings Bryan and bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont and
H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and the incredible - if long-forgotten -
federal official Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the 20s was
the most powerful woman in the country. (Perhaps most surprising of all
is Okrent's account of Joseph P. Kennedy's legendary, and...

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