Last Call by Daniel Okrant

From The Week of November 21, 2010

In Mr. Okrents' heterogeneous career, he has been an author, an editor of the New York Times and an inventor of an early form of fantasy baseball. But though these contributions were, I'm sure, memorable, this biography of Prohibition in America ought to bring him the highest praise. Thorough, imagistic, and humorous, Mr. Okrents journey through the insanity of Prohibition, from its improbable origins to its predictable dismissal, leaves few historical stones unrolled.

We know now, from experience and history, that allies are often made from the strangest of bedfellows who ignore one another's faults for the sake of a common goal. This phenomenon was most memorably realized in the 1919 passage of the constitutional amendment which brought Prohibition to the United States. For it was a coalition of protestant ministries, womens temperance groups and opportunistic distributers of alcohol who came together to fuel the movement to ban the sale of beverages which contained more than three percent alcohol. This event, in addition to staining the U.S. Constitution, proved to have disastrous results. Proponents of the ban completely misread human nature, underestimating in the extreme the desire of people to have their indulgences. No one wants to live under the judgmental moralizing of a government far more corrupted than they. Consequently, a movement purporting to bring a new harmony to America buried police in nuisance arrests, allowed for a sharp spike in crime of all stripes, inspired a whole generation of subversives willing to defy authorities, and lead to the creation of organized crime. After all, people wanted their booze, the booze had to come from somewhere, so territories had to be established, family connections made, underground networks set up, and officials bribed to look the other way.

In Last Call, these arguments are successfully made by Mr. Okrent who uses an amusing cast of characters to provide background and context for a movement that was not only antithetical to the spirit of the American Revolution, it created entire criminal enterprises as a people born on the will to be free refused to be told what to do. It's a remarkable folly told wonderfully well by a first-rate writer who will, I hope, continue to publish work of this quality for years to come. (4/5 Stars)