Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $2.20
Date Created : Jun 22, 2010 22:00:06
You'll never watch baseball the same way again. A timeless baseball classic and a must read for any fan worthy of the name, Nine Innings dissects a single baseball game played in June 1982 -- inning by inning, play by play. Daniel Okrent, a seasoned writer and lifelong fan, chose as his subject a Milwaukee BrewersBaltimore Orioles matchup, though it could have been any game, because, as Okrent reveals, the essence of baseball, no matter where or when it's played, has been and will always be the same. In this particular moment of baseball history you will discover myriad aspects of the sport that are crucial to its nature but so often invisible to the fans -- the hidden language of catchers' signals, the physiology of pitching, the balance sheet of a club owner, the gait of a player stepping up to the plate. With the purity of heart and unwavering attention to detail that characterize our national pastime, Okrent goes straight to the core of the world's greatest game. You'll never watch baseball the same way again.
±1±: Best Buy This book is about the last game in a four-game series between the Baltimore Orioles and the Milwaukee Brewers. It is an old book (I was four years old when this baseball game was played), but I still found it VERY interesting. I do not know a lot of the players, coaches and other baseball personalities in the book, but I still loved it. Especially interesting was tracing the life and career of Bud Selig. Who would have known that this owner would turn out to be one of the most controversial baseball commissioners in baseball history? Also interesting in the book was chapter six's discussion of the history of the baseball commissioner and how it had evolved since its inception after the Black Sox scandal. I consider myself a big baseball fan, but there were a lot of baseball things I had no clue about.
I really enjoyed the writing style of the author. He did not dramatize the baseball game, but told it very matter of factly as most radio announcers and followers of the game see it. With almost 3,000 games a season, it is hard to be too dramatic about any of them. The book does a great job of reflecting the different baseball personalities, and not only their careers but also a bit of their personal lives. Almost always included was the business aspect of their careers.
My only complaint about the book is that at times I was lost in the onslaught of names. Several times throughout the book, there were so many names being used, I couldn't keep track of them all. This was frustrating, but did not cancel out the value of the book. I wish they would make another one (make it a Braves game please). on Sale!
±1±: Now is the time Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Order Today!
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Over All Rating Reviews : Great Deal : $17.55
Date Created : Jun 16, 2010 06:03:54
A brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America’s most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America’s favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages.
From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing.
Yet we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent’s dazzling explanation of why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives of Americans changed the country forever.
Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women’s suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax.
Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call is peopled with vivid characters of an astonishing variety: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan and bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont and H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and the incredible—if long-forgotten—federal official Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the twenties was the most powerful woman in the country. (Perhaps most surprising of all is Okrent’s account of Joseph P. Kennedy’s legendary, and long-misunderstood, role in the liquor business.)
It’s a book rich with stories from nearly all parts of the country. Okrent’s narrative runs through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between the sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing “sacramental” wine; New England fishing communities that gave up fishing for the more lucrative rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who had voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology.
Last Call is capacious, meticulous, and thrillingly told. It stands as the most complete history of Prohibition ever written and confirms Daniel Okrent’s rank as a major American writer.
±1±: Best Buy The dawn of the 20th century gave witness to a modern American history that continues to resonate to the present day. The growing progressive political movement of the early century that supported radical national change and our country's involvement in WWI were but two of that period's commanding events. Leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are large figures in this era and play an important part in shaping the posture of the nation going into the 1920's. The economic boom of the "roaring twenties" and subsequent collapse of the stock market are nation altering milestones while the economic downturn that then ensues is a clarifying moment in understanding our development as the world power that we enjoy today. As these events befell the nation, an underlying movement of alcoholic Prohibition played an amazingly influential role in the demise and subsequent recovery of the country's political standing and economy. Daniel Okrent spells out, in a splendidly written account of an often forgotten period, how this somewhat transparent genesis of misguided legislation and religious fanaticism came to be and how its demise ultimately combined with FDR's New Deal to bring recovery to the nation in pre WWII America.
Attempting to uncover the roots of Prohibition is somewhat akin to the same undertaking in, say, baseball history (a topic Okrent is very fluent in)...there is no definitive starting point. Dan's narrative essentially starts in the 1840's, but is qualified by the statement "America had been awash in drink almost from the start..." as the book's first sentence. We're told that as long as there has been drink, there has been temperance. When six Baltimore drunks swear off drinking, "Washingtonian evangelists poured out a lot of sulfurous rhetoric to lure something between three hundred thousand and six hundred thousand men out of the dungeon of inebriety." Seeing an opportunity, Frances Willard (a Northwestern University educator and major proponent of temperance and women's voting rights) suggests women's suffrage as a coalescence with this renewed temperance movement and as this synthesis gains steam, history is forever changed. We learn that as the prohibition movement grows in numbers and agitation, the end game (unbelievably, a constitutional amendment) could not materialize until the government found an alternate avenue for revenue (there was at this time an excise tax on alcoholic beverages). The advent of the Federal Income Tax in 1913 (first brought to congress by William Jennings Bryan in 1893) solves this problem and temperance "pressure" groups such as the Anti-Saloon League under the forceful leadership of the all but forgotten Wayne B. Wheeler lobby congress to initiate prohibition legislation. Congressmen Richmond Hobson and (later) Andrew Volstead are seminal purveyors of the temperance act while anti-German fervor (Germans being the prime beer brewers) brought on by World War I is escalated by George Creel's "Committee of Truth", a harrowing propaganda group. The movement is ultimately born into legislation that passes both the House and Senate and goes before President Wilson for ratification, which he ultimately vetoes.
The legislation is nonetheless voted into law in 1919 following a congressional veto override vote and enacted a year later. Okrent's narrative takes off at this point as the truly sublime aspects of prohibition are the actions taken to avoid its enforcement. Story after story and character after character are introduced here as we learn of offshore denizens such as Nassau, Bahamas and St. Pierre, Canada (south of Newfoundland) that become "rum-running" stanchions, providing the needed "demon rum" to American drinkers while avoiding the vastly inadequate and undermanned federal enforcement officials. Characters such as rum runner Bill McCoy dominate Okrent's narrative while showing to what lengths the would-be drinkers and violators of the law will go to get their booze. Homemade distilling becomes sophisticated as depicted by the quote "The gin is aged about the length of time it takes to get from the bathroom where it is made to the front porch where the cocktail is in progress."
Okrent proceeds with the vast culture of Prohibition avoidance by adeptly describing the birth of the nation wide crime syndicates. Gangsters such as Al Capone necessarily occupy a large portion of the narrative while we learn that (surprisingly) Capone's flame burned out at an excessively early age (arriving on the scene at 27, gone by 29 and dead of syphilis by 40). As Prohibition proceeds into the mid to late 1920s, we learn of the continuing and assorted ways in which it's avoided. Unbelievably, the Volstead Act (an add-on to the constitutional amendment that covered enforcement) allowed for certain "exceptions", one being the use of liquor for "medicinal purposes." As can be expected, this opened a huge loop hole for bootleggers to sell their wares while maintaining some semblance of legality. Drug "stores" now sprung up in large numbers (these stores were, in most cases, glorified speakeasies) and had certified doctors at the drug counters for prescription writing. Most "patients" were being treated for an amazing outbreak of "debility" and had prescriptions such as: "take 3 oz. every hour for stimulant until stimulated." One my favorite avoidance acts is the seeming demagogue-like behavior of the elite class as they continue to enjoy their drink while extolling the virtues of temperance for the lower classes: "The fashionably rich demand their rum as an inalienable class privilege,"..."You don't want to forget prohibition is a mighty good thing for the working-classes." One of the many dichotomies of this legislation is the Federal government's lack of funding for its enforcement. Year after year we see funding budgets reduced while the government (Mabel Willebrandt, Assistant Attorney General being the most notable) is forced to obviate the growing circumvention of the law. Court cases rise and the obvious result is allowing many crimes to go unpunished...indeed, Okrent spells out many cases of "slap on the wrist" enforcement for local violators while the kingpins (a la Capone) continue their multi-billion dollar bootlegging spree.
It all had to end of course. By 1927, a powerful lobbying group called the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment (AAPA) was in full swing. Conceived in 1918, it was an association known for its class distinction and disenchantment with the 18th amendment and was led by Pierre du Pont a former chairman of General Motors. This group tore bit by bit at the hearts and minds of the drys while pushing repeal with nearly as much zeal as the ASL pushed temperance. Adding also to Prohibitions demise was the ridiculous Jones Act of 1929, an act which was born seemingly as a dying gasp of the drys while pushing enforcement of the Volstead Act beyond reasonable means. Now it suddenly became vogue to adhere to the repeal movement as socialite Pauline Sabin and her group of women elitists (the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform) led a huge lobbying effort across the country. Finally, of course, the market crash of 1929 was the death knell of this absurd experiment. With spiraling revenue from income and property taxes, many branches of the government clearly sought to stem the bleeding by ending Prohibition and all its costs while regulating alcohol and, most importantly, taxing its production and sale. And so it was on February 14th 1933 that the Senate voted to repeal the 18th amendment by adding the 21st...two days later, the House also voted for repeal and on December 5th, the required 36th state (Utah) voted to ratify the repeal amendment thus ending Prohibition. As FDR stated as he signed the bill into law, it's time for a drink!
A wonderful amalgam of important but usually untied (in literary terms anyway) historical moments, Last Call provides an amazing look at the power of single minded focus and the movement of special interest groups once momentum is attained. Dan Okrent exhumes many forgotten and vilified personalities from the late 19th and early 20th centuries and integrates them into the many seminal historical moments of this era in stark but very lucid prose. Mixing anecdote with darn good history, Okrent provides in virtually each sentence mountains of information that, I'd wager, most casual readers of history had not heretofore known and has added greatly to the written word on our roots as a nation. This is very much Pulitzer material. Cheers!
