Okrent - Last call: the rise and fall of Prohibition, 1920-1933

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Praise for Last Call

Named One of the Years 10 Best
by The Wall Street Journal

This is a great book: witty and graceful, balanced and deep. It is captivating social history told in a narrative that races along like a Bimini rumrunner angling into a south Florida bay.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

A remarkably original account of the Prohibition era, a fourteen-year orgy of lawbreaking that permanently transformed American social life... A narrative delight.

The New York Times Book Review

Okrents dazzling history leaves us with one whiskey-sharp insight above all others: The War on Alcohol and the War on Drugs failed because they were, beneath all the blather, a war on human nature.

Slate

As Daniel Okrent shows in Last Call , his superb history of the Prohibition era, obtaining a drink with a lot more kick than a bottle of pop wasnt at all difficult.... Fortunes were made by taking advantage of exemptions for medicinal alcohol, for hard cider made by farmers from fermented fruit, and for sacramental wine used in religious services. And that was just the legal stuff.

The Wall Street Journal

Last Call is a potentially, um, dry story, but Okrent is a born storyteller. In his hands, the prodigiously researched narrative, rife with tales of corruption, adventure, and backstabbing, flies like fiction.

Entertainment Weekly

This book is an extraordinary accomplishment, both scholarly and readable.

Barrons

Okrent fills a vast canvas with captivating characters, from the hatchet-wielding saloon buster Carry Nation (six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache) to Canadian bootlegger Sam Bronfman, whose audacious smuggling laid the foundations of a billion-dollar family fortune.

Time

The movement to repeal Prohibition was a vexed and convoluted affair itself, well explained here; but before taking it up, Okrent brings us through the wild years of Prohibition. He describes in entertaining detail the ingenious casuistry and lucrative operations that arose out of the law.

The Boston Globe

Its a stunningly thorough, well-researched, and often unforgiving glimpse into one of the most bizarre social experiments ever conducted... an illuminating tour de force, and a great addition to the bookshelves of both casual readers and historical enthusiasts alike.

San Francisco Book Review

Last Call is the most persuasive and best-documented explanation as to why and how America decided to ban alcohol.... This is sure to be one of the years best American history books.

BusinessWeek

Daniel Okrents remarkable new history of Prohibition... explains with clarity and gusto how a mighty alliance of moralists and progressives, suffragists and xenophobes led to the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment.

The Christian Science Monitor

Brilliantly researched... Last Call is fun, fascinating, and as effervescent as champagne.

People

Okrent makes this complex and detailed story into a page-turning read.... He has fashioned a work of popular history at its best, the kind that teaches us something new on every page while keeping us thoroughly entertained.

The Courier-Journal

Okrent, a journalist-scholar with a novelistic sense of narrative, goes through Prohibitions influence on language, literature, the media, the judiciary system.

The Miami Herald

We all know how the story ends, but the historical play-by-play, with all its sensational headlines and criminal ingenuity, is something to be savored.

Oxford American

If you are interested in American history, and especially if you enjoy expressing your liberty with a drink now and then, Last Call is top-shelf reading.

Wine Spectator

As Daniel Okrent demonstrates in Last Call , his witty and exhaustive new history of Prohibition, the so-called Noble Experiment created nothing like a virtuous teetotalers paradise. The drys had their law, as Okrent observes, and the wets would have their liquor.

The Washington Post

Okrent draws the reader in with creative storytelling and something new (and actually useful) on every page.

Newsweek

A remarkable exploration of the era and the movements that led to one of the nations biggest mistakes... Last Call does what great history should: acts as a window to the past that opens to a greater understanding of our present.

Forbes.com

Last Call makes for rowdy, riveting reading about the characters who got us into Prohibition, and those who dragged us out.

The Plain Dealer

An assiduously researched, well-written, and continually eye-opening work on what has actually been a neglected subject.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Okrents style is bracing and wry, his research is vast and impressive, and his insight is penetrating.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

This sprightly written and thoroughly annotated work is recommended for both the general reader, to whom it is directed, and the scholar.

Library Journal

Okrent asks and answers some important questions in this fascinating exploration of a failed social experiment.

Booklist

Belongs on the shelves of every serious student of the U.S. in the twentieth century.

Foreign Affairs

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First Scribner trade paperback edition June 2011

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009051127

ISBN 978-0-7432-7702-0

ISBN 978-0-7432-7704-4 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-4391-7169-1 (ebook)

For my sister, Judith Simon, and in memory of absent friends:

Robert N. Nylen (19442008)

Richard Seaver (19262009)

Henry Z. Steinway (19152008)