A jaunty, informative journey into the past.
Southern travels, with cocktails.
Smith combines travelogue and history in a brisk, breezy tour of sites throughout the South associated with Prohibition: museums (the Moonshine Museum, for one, and the Museum of the American Cocktail), hotels, distilleries, bars, speak-easies, and cemeteries. Each chapter features capsule biographies of colorful figures in the battle to ban alcohol, some long lost to history; points travelers to places of interest; and ends with recipes for cocktails with such enticing names as The Presbyterian (made with Palmetto whiskey), Mary Pickford (based on rum), The Kentucky Mule (bourbon, of course), and White Trash Lemonade (made with white lightning moonshine). In the South, prohibition began long before the 18th Amendment banned the sale and transport of alcohol in 1920. By the early 19th century, Smith discovered, America was “a nation of drunkards” who consumed great quantities of alcohol. “Beer and hard cider were safer alternatives than water, which might kill you,” and commercial distilleries proliferated. Here, Smith quotes Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: “by the 1820s, liquor was so plentiful and so freely available, it was less expensive than tea.” Drunkards, though, were a threat to their families, inspiring many women to hail reformers such as hatchet-wielding Carry Nation, who wreaked havoc among saloon patrons. Protecting the family was not the only impetus for prohibiting alcohol. Racism, too, was a motivation: “The stereotype of the drunken black man defiling white womanhood was a driving force behind the Southern temperance movement.” As much as many religious leaders supported prohibition, so did bootleggers such as Al Capone, who made fortunes supplying thirsty customers, evading punishment by bribing public officials and the police. One teetotaling South Carolina governor took the cue from bootleggers and put control of production and distribution of liquor in the hands of the state government, “reaping vast funds for the state treasury.” State liquor stores still exist, Smith found, as do dry counties throughout the South.
A jaunty, informative journey into the past.Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-929647-58-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Evening Post Books
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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