Hearing THE LAST CALL
It’s no surprise that there’s plenty of media attention for Daniel Okrent’s history of prohibition and drinking in America, The Last Call (attention, Glenn Beck, the founding fathers may have been men of faith, but they were also generally three sheets to the wind). Okrent, who was the first public editor of the NYT, is well-connected in the media and his book Great Fortune about Rockefeller Center was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize. By the way, he also invented Rotisserie League Baseball. And, who could resist a book about American’s fraught relationship with alcohol?
Time magazine, says that the book about much more than Prohibition,
If you’re looking for a lasting legacy of Prohibition, it’s the Washington lobbyists who use Wheeler’s tactics [Wheeler was the “mastermind who transformed the temperance movement into a political shock wave”] to bend government to their agendas.
It gets an A from Entertainment Weekly review editor Tina Jordan,
Okrent is a born storyteller. In his hands, the prodigiously researched narrative, rife with tales of corruption, adventure, and backstabbing, flies like fiction.
People gave the book its highest rating and Business Week calls it “one of the year’s best history books.” It was also featured on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Libraries we checked are showing heavy holds on light ordering.
Okrent himself describes the book in the following video.
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S&S Audio; 9780743599214, CD, $39.99