Last Call For Liberty

The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Will conflicts, hostility, and incivility tear the country apart? Os Guinness provides a careful observation of the American experiment, offering a stirring vision for faithful citizenship and renewed responsibility for not only the nation but also the watching world.

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.

When establishing the fundamental principles of our great nation, our founders incorporated into them an understanding of the Liberty they sought to secure. An Individual Liberty that is natural, "endowed by our Creator," and for which we are indebted to no man for. In establishing our "limited" Constitution and the Republic it ordains, they incorporated an understanding of both what threatens that Liberty and the means by which "designing men" may undermine them. How many of us today have such an understanding of either? Do we know and have an understanding of the fundamental principles upon which that Individual Liberty-our only true earthly freedom, prosperity, and the "pursuit" of any independent happiness-are even possible? If we don't, how are we to recognize what threatens it, who or what has targeted it for destruction, or how close we are to losing it for generations to come, if not forever? It is with these things in mind, and a father's concern for the very freedom of his children, that a decade-long research was launched: Last Call for Liberty is the result. There is a truth even in the deception that seeks to abolish it. A free people who wish to remain so should know both. It's an epiphany worth careful consideration and, in the sacred cause of Liberty, an absolute necessity, not just for ourselves but, even more importantly, for Posterity and Freedom itself.

When establishing the fundamental principles of our great nation, our founders incorporated into them an understanding of the Liberty they sought to secure. An Individual Liberty that is natural, "endowed by our Creator," and for which we are indebted to no man for. In establishing our "limited" Constitution and the Republic it ordains, they incorporated an understanding of both what threatens that Liberty and the means by which "designing men" may undermine them. How many of us today have such an understanding of either? Do we know and have an understanding of the fundamental principles upon which that Individual Liberty--our only true earthly freedom, prosperity, and the "pursuit" of any independent happiness--are even possible? If we don't, how are we to recognize what threatens it, who or what has targeted it for destruction, or how close we are to losing it for generations to come, if not forever? It is with these things in mind, and a father's concern for the very freedom of his children, that a decade-long research was launched: Last Call for Liberty is the result. There is a truth even in the deception that seeks to abolish it. A free people who wish to remain so should know both. It's an epiphany worth careful consideration and, in the sacred cause of Liberty, an absolute necessity, not just for ourselves but, even more importantly, for Posterity and Freedom itself.

WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism “High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PROSE AWARD ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, BookPage, Booklist They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud—a memoir about his son’s death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean’s Dorothy and Red, about Thompson’s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.

Leber shares the divine visions she has experienced, which she credits as being the reasons she did not commit suicide. (Christian)

THE LAST CALL is a compelling and gritty memoir that depicts David's story from the time he was adopted at six months old, by cop-turned NY TIMES #1 bestselling author, Joseph Wambaugh, and the colorful, but challenging, years growing up the son of a celebrity.David started drinking when he was a very young boy, and slipped into the darkness of addiction and mental illness by the time he was nine. Alcohol was the gas that fueled his countless self-imposed disasters that befell him for the next thirty years. He lived a life of lawlessness and debauchery, a convicted felon from the time he was 23, having been in several high speed car chases, fights, drugs, even accused, and turned in by his own parents, for committing a string of bank robberies. He was in and out of Institutions for the vast majority of his adult life, including drug rehabs, mental hospitals, jails, and ultimately State Prison. David had ability to stay one step ahead of the law, and, being a master manipulator, he was always able to con his way back into the good graces of his parents, with selfish motives. He was able to avoid almost all consequences his whole life, until one day his luck ran out and he got arrested for the last time. As David was sitting in the back of the cop car, He had a strange and powerful experience that was to change the course of his life forever. When he got out of prison, he had to learn to live. He was emotionally retarded, having never grown up, making his grand entrance into life at age 40. The Last Call is a story of tragedy, loss, miracles, and the Power of God.

America has lost its way. It is caught between two revolutions and alternately suppresses and squanders freedom with a prodigal carelessness. Os Guinness outlines a pathway toward defining and ordering freedom, righting national wrongs, and passing freedom's baton from generation to generation. The present moment must not be missed.

Reproduction of the original: The Last Call by Richard Dowling