Book Review: Last Call

Written 10 years before the initiation of American lockdown, Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition contains essential facts and rare disclosures about Prohibition. This comprehensive account, highly researched, noted, indexed, with pages of photographs and published in 2010 by Simon & Schuster, is both credible and well written. Author Okrent, an editor for Time and the New York Times, slants left, of course. He doesn’t pretend to be deep. Journalist Okrent presents no major, serious conclusions, let alone a consistent and clear historical narrative, let alone results from any investigation predicated on philosophical detection. The reader seeking to understand America’s recent past and its crucial connection to today’s looming threats nonetheless gains enormous value. 

For example, the reader learns that PT Barnum bears some responsibility for Prohibition. Barnum put on an anti-alcohol show (which Barry Manilow later turned into a musical) at his New York City mu…