Spent a couple of days reading this, it's a kinda long, kinda dense book, and my life took a turn toward the weird. It's an informative book, laden with all kinds of juicy ironies about the rise and almost immediate fall of Prohibition. There are hypocrisies galore. Also some of the ideas people had about how to enforce the 18th Amendment remind me of the last czars, who couldn't have done more to ensure the coming of the Revolution to Russia if they'd tried--some of the ideas that floated around in the Hoover presidency were similarly working against their own stated aims. As with any more or less pop history book, it's kinda a collection of vignettes and short arcs tied together like beads on parallel strings; this is not snark or complaint. I don't know how much is going to stick, it's not a field I have a ton of prior focus on, but it held my interest more than well enough while I was reading it.
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