This is the history of temperance and prohibition as you’ve never read it before: redefining temperance as a progressive, global, pro-justice movement that affected virtually every significant world leader from the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries.Unlike many traditional “dry” histories, Smashing the Liquor Machine gives voice to minority and subaltern figures who resisted the global liquor industry, and further highlights that the impulses that led to the temperance movement were far more progressive and variegated than American readers have been led to believe. If, like me, you enjoy a good examination of the Jazz Age, you’ll want to pour yourself a gin and soda — or perhaps mix yourself my favorite cocktail, the French 75 (created in 1927) — and sip your way through these titles. We could fill a whole library with nonfiction books about Prohibition without once straying into anything other than fictionalized versions or accounts hazed by time or memory. But there is also an entire library’s worth of fiction about this fascinating era, and if you’re interested in that angle, check out Jamie Canaves’s excellent list of Prohibition Era fiction. All of the books in this list so far have been written by at least one generation, if not two, removed from Prohibition itself. Not so with How Dry We Were, published in 1963 as a memoir of Prohibition by Lee, born in 1911, and scrupulously researched to discover what he didn’t know from life. All the reviews I could find of this book say that it is an invaluable addition to the deep well of Prohibition texts, so if you can find a copy, definitely pick it up.
