Last Call: The Rise & Fall of Prohibition
Daniel Okrent

Paperback, 468pp
Scribner, 2011

This book explores the origins, implementation, and failure of that great American delusion known as Prohibition. “Last Call” explains how Prohibition happened, what life under it was like, and what it did to the country.

Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women’s suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax.

ISBN 9780743277044