The 11 chapters on Prohibition proper are the heart of the book, and they more than make up for its rocky start. Gough's theatrics make him just the sort of historical character we all love to read about, but reality, alas, was considerably drabber, for the Washingtonians were one of history's dead ends, and in any event they were neither the first nor the largest of the original temperance societies. The need to peg events to colourful personalities is presumably the reason why the story starts in the 1840s with the Washingtonians, a temperance group whose members included one of the great showmen of the age: John Bartholomew Gough. Here, Okrent paints with a broad brush in an attempt to fast-forward the story from the hard-drinking days of the early 19th century all the way up to the dawn of the Progressive Era. This shortcoming makes the book's first chapter its weakest. There are so many dominant personalities in the book, each talking over the other, that its stated objective, to explain how and why America came to have Prohibition, is too often lost sight of. The problem is that it also happens to be history as Carlyle would have written it, which is to say that what the reader is really being offered is a populist variant of the Great Man theory of history. Last Call, in short, is history as Dickens would have written it: strong on characters but weak on plot. Last Call is his most ambitious project to date, employing a small stable of research assistants and involving Okrent himself in extensive archival research. Great Fortune, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history, and in between writing books he has worked as editor for The New York Times, and before that, for Life and Time. Okrent is one of those people who goes from strength to strength his previous book, Prohibition: Thirteen Years that Changed America.

Prohibition: The Era of Excess in 1976, it was Norman Clark'sĭeliver us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition in 1997, it was Edward Behr's Since Krout's time, it seems as though scarcely a year has passed in which the public has not been offered yet another book about Prohibition: In 1962, it was Andrew Sinclair's

The Origins of Prohibition, it was published in 1925, five years after the start of the Noble Experiment and eight years before its unlamented demise. To John Allan Krout, long a fixture at Columbia University, goes the distinction of having written the first real history of Prohibition.

Last Call by Daniel Okrent