Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

by: Daniel Okrent

From Booklist...

Okrent provides a remarkable breakdown of Prohibition, that uniquely American attempt to banish the sale and consumption of alcohol. In 1919, a constitutional amendment prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within the U.S. was ratified and scheduled to go into effect the following year. Okrent traces the roots of the temperance movement, the suffrage movement, and the anti-immigrant sentiment that added sustained fuel to the cause. He also unravels the complicated politics of the era, providing insight into why the Eighteenth Amendment was pushed through and how it was eventually repealed. After Prohibition went into effect, in 1920, the course of American life and culture was profoundly altered in both large and small ways. Everyone knows about the rise of the gangster era, but what is less well documented are the reactions and the responses of ordinary American citizens. Okrent asks and answers some important questions in this fascinating exploration of a failed social experiment. --Margaret Flanagan

~Ty

A Great Read

The Imperfectionists
A nicely woven tale of the people linked together by a newspaper and its decline.
Read the review from the New York Times.
--Sarah

Track the Oil Spill with updates, analysis and news

--Provided by GREENR (by Gale)

Visualizing the BP Oil Spill Disaster

This brings the spill close to home.

Vote for your favorite Suspense Thriller!

Take part in NPR's national contest - choose from a list of 182 titles (many that can be found at the library) and vote for your favorite suspense, killer-thriller books.

Oil Spill Timeline

An estimated 92 million gallons of oil have leaked into the Gulf so far. - PBS

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Learn more about oil at Your Wilkinson Public Library.

- Faith

Barbecue time!

The weather is perfect for grilling! Get recipes ideas and tips from these books: Weber's on the Grill: Steak & Sides and the same for Chicken.

new Poet Laureate

W. S. Merwin was writing and publishing poetry before I was born, and continues to do so today. His teachers and collaborators make up a who's who of 20th century poetry: Robert Graves, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, James Wright, Rober Bly, to name a few. An outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Merwin donated the prize money from his 1971 Pulitzer to draft resistance organizations. Many of his poems reflect his interest in Buddhism and deep ecology. Here is his 1967 For a Coming Extinction:

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices

Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

In June, Merwin was named Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. A year earlier, Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize, for The Shadow of Sirius.

--Andy

Wildflowers: on display at the library and in the high country

Learn to identify all of those beautiful wildflowers that you see while hiking. The Library has this guidebook and many more.

Mystery of the Fading Talent...

A tip in an article about a wealthy man (who claimed he wasn't rich) who runs a bookstore in New York devoted entirely to crime novels lead me to James Crumley. Largely unknown, mostly forgotten, Crumley in 1978 published The Last Good Kiss. The novel is set in Montana and San Francisco in the early 1970's, and lays out the story of an alcoholic private eye on the cold trail of missing flower child. Like Raymond Chandler's four great Philip Marlowe novels, the beauty of Crumley's book lies not in the plot or any whodunit cleverness. Simply put, it is the fineness of the writing that makes the book such a worthwhile read. Page one:

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog...in a ramshackle joint...drinking the heart right out of a beautiful spring afternoon.

Unfortunately, like Chandler, Crumley's muse did not stick around for very long. Chandler's best work was done between 1939 and 1943, after which his prose went decidedly downhill. Perhaps a similar malaise afflicted Crumley. By the time he returned to his hero, C. W. Sughrue, in The Mexican Tree Duck in 1993 his writing style had devolved to self-parody. That at least was my judgment on the book -- I stayed with it for two chapters and then threw it into the corner of the room in disgust before turning off the lights and going to sleep.

This judgment may be hasty and there are other novels he wrote between '78 and '93 that might well bear looking at. But it made we wonder about novelists whose talent peaks early and then goes downhill...Philip Roth was on this trajectory. After the promise of Goodbye Columbus his novels of the 70's were simply bad, the notoriety of Portnoy's Complaint not withstanding. But then he pulled it together late in life with American Pastoral and Human Stain.

Perhaps there is something in the private eye genre that chips away at an authors authenticity, or perhaps Crumley simply drank too much. Or both. Novelists that write about destruction and death of the soul are in a hazardous line of work.

BP Oil Spill ~ If Only Information Flowed as Freely as Oil

As the BP oil disaster enters its 77th Day we speak to a scientist leading a team of researchers trying to get access to the well to better study what is happening at the site. Dr. Ira Leifer, who’s on the federally appointed Flow Rate Technical Group, says BP is restricting his access to study the gushing oil well. - Democracy Now

Learn more about oil spills at your Wilkinson Public Library.