Last Call
The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

America’s obsession with its own history has resulted in innumerable bestsellers. Like baseball and the Civil War, Prohibition is one of the grand American topics, and now it is the subject of Daniel Okrent’s masterful, prize-worthy tour de force.  Last Call is a narrative history of one of the most puzzling and most exciting eras in American history, the years 1920 to 1933, when the Constitution was amended to restrict human social behavior. Beginning with the liquor-soaked country that the U.S. was in the nineteenth century, Last Call explains three things: How Prohibition happened, what life under Prohibition was like, and what it did to the country. Last Call, peopled with vivid characters of an astonishing variety (Susan B. Anthony and Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan and Sam Bronfman, Pierre du Pont and H.L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and Clarence Darrow) and jammed with stories from nearly all parts of the country, reveals this strange chapter in our history as never before.