Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Audiobook (Free)

An excellent, 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 favorite pastimes: drinking alcohol consumption.

From its start, America has been awash in drink. The cruising vessel that brought John Winthrop towards the shores of the brand new World in 1630 transported more beverage than water. With the 1820s, liquor flowed so 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 as it was astonishing.

However we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent’s dazzling description of as to why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and exactly how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the personal lives of Americans changed the country forever.

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

Through it all, Americans kept drinking, likely to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and occasionally fatally) imbibe a common intoxicants. Last Contact is definitely peopled with vivid characters of the astonishing range: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Weekend, 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 through the entire twenties was the most powerful woman in the united states. (Perhaps most surprising of most is Okrent’s account of Joseph P. Kennedy’s famous, and long-misunderstood, function in the liquor business.)

It’s a reserve rich with stories from almost all places. Okrent’s narrative runs through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between your sexes were transformed permanently; California vineyards busily producing “sacramental” wines; New England angling communities that quit angling for the more lucrative rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who acquired voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology.

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