Download Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition AudioBook Free
A brilliant, authoritative, and amazing record of America's most puzzling period, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to limit one of America's favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages. From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that helped bring John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 transported more ale than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That People in america would ever consent to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing. Yet we have, and Previous Call is Daniel Okrent's amazing reason of why we achieved it, what life under Prohibition was like, and exactly how this unprecedented amount of government disturbance in the private lives of People in america changed the united states forever. Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse pushes: the growing politics electricity of the women's suffrage movements, which allied itself with the antiliquor plan; worries of small-town, native-stock Protestants that these were burning off control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World Warfare I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, which range from the rise of the auto to the advancement of the income tax. Through everything, Americans kept drinking, heading to remarkably creative measures to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Previous Call is peopled with brilliant characters of your astonishing variety: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Weekend, William Jennings Bryan and bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont and H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and the incredible-if long-forgotten-federal formal Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the 20s was the most powerful woman in the united states. (Perhaps most amazing of all is Okrent's accounts of Joseph P. Kennedy's legendary, and long-misunderstood, role in the liquor business.) It's a publication rich with experiences from almost all places. Okrent's narrative works through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between your sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing "sacramental" wine beverage; New England angling communities that gave up angling for the more profitable rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who possessed voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology. Previous Call is capacious, meticulous, and thrillingly advised. It stands as the most complete record of Prohibition ever before written and confirms Daniel Okrent's get ranking as a significant American writer.
