Reading Wednesday
Feb. 18th, 2015 03:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhWhat did you just finish?
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. A history about, well, what it sounds like. The more famous elements of Prohibition – the gangsters, the speakeasies, the enforcement agents – get a few mentions, but they're not the main drive of the book (not that I really wanted more topics, since the book's already over 400 pages in hardcover). Instead, it's focused on the politics of the whole matter: both how it was originally passed and then how it was quickly repealed. Which is pretty fascinating; I'm always intrigued by that weird moment in American history where the Republican and Democratic parties basically switched places in regard to progressive social policies. There's a ton of other fascinating little tidbits in here as well (the cruise industry's start as a way to drink alcohol in international waters! hilarious beer ads of the 1800s! Prohibition's connection to issues as diverse as women's suffrage, the first income tax, and the rebirth of the KKK! Joe Kennedy: not actually a bootlegger!).
The huge number of people involved occasionally made the action a little hard for me to follow, especially when the author seemed to expect the reader to already know some of them (apparently the Bronfman family and Eliot Ness are super famous! Sadly, I am ill-informed and did not recognize either). But despite that, the book's more of a page-turner than political history has any right to be.
What are you currently reading?
Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile. A novel from NetGalley, about an art teacher from LA who implausibly ends up as the owner of a sugarcane field in Louisiana, with only a few months and almost no money to bring it to harvest. I've only just started it, but it seems charming so far.
Also,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curtana wrote me this amazing little story about Hannibal Sefton, and you all should go read it and love it.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition by Daniel Okrent. A history about, well, what it sounds like. The more famous elements of Prohibition – the gangsters, the speakeasies, the enforcement agents – get a few mentions, but they're not the main drive of the book (not that I really wanted more topics, since the book's already over 400 pages in hardcover). Instead, it's focused on the politics of the whole matter: both how it was originally passed and then how it was quickly repealed. Which is pretty fascinating; I'm always intrigued by that weird moment in American history where the Republican and Democratic parties basically switched places in regard to progressive social policies. There's a ton of other fascinating little tidbits in here as well (the cruise industry's start as a way to drink alcohol in international waters! hilarious beer ads of the 1800s! Prohibition's connection to issues as diverse as women's suffrage, the first income tax, and the rebirth of the KKK! Joe Kennedy: not actually a bootlegger!).
The huge number of people involved occasionally made the action a little hard for me to follow, especially when the author seemed to expect the reader to already know some of them (apparently the Bronfman family and Eliot Ness are super famous! Sadly, I am ill-informed and did not recognize either). But despite that, the book's more of a page-turner than political history has any right to be.
What are you currently reading?
Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile. A novel from NetGalley, about an art teacher from LA who implausibly ends up as the owner of a sugarcane field in Louisiana, with only a few months and almost no money to bring it to harvest. I've only just started it, but it seems charming so far.
Also,
curtana wrote me this amazing little story about Hannibal Sefton, and you all should go read it and love it.
