A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating background of America’s most puzzling period, the years 1920 to 1933, when the US Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favourite pastimes: drinking alcohol consumption.

From its start, America continues to be awash in drink. The cruising vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the brand new World in 1630 transported more beer than water. With the 1820s, liquor flowed therefore plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to about Last Contact: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition relinquish their booze was as improbable since it was astonishing.

Yet we did, and Last Contact is Daniel Okrent’s dazzling description of as to why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of authorities interference in the personal lives of Americans changed the united states forever.

Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse causes: the developing political power of the women’s suffrage motion, which allied itself with the antiliquor advertising campaign; worries of small-town, native-stock Protestants that these were dropping control of their nation to the immigrants of the huge metropolitan areas; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World Battle I; and a number of other unlikely elements, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the introduction of the income tax.

Through it all, Americans kept drinking, likely to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and occasionally fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call is certainly peopled with vibrant characters of the 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 as well as the incredible-if long-forgotten-federal public Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the twenties was the most effective woman in the country. (Perhaps most surprising of all is Okrent’s account of Joseph P. Kennedy’s famous, and long-misunderstood, role in the liquor business.)

It’s a reserve rich with tales from nearly all parts of the country. Okrent’s narrative operates through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relationships between your sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing “sacramental” wine; New England fishing communities that gave up angling for the more lucrative rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who experienced voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology.

Last Call is certainly capacious, careful, and thrillingly told. It stands as the utmost complete history of Prohibition ever written and confirms Daniel Okrent’s rank as a significant American writer.