The War on Alcohol Audiobook By Lisa McGirr cover art

The War on Alcohol

Prohibition and the Rise of the American State

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The War on Alcohol

By: Lisa McGirr
Narrated by: Donna Postel
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About this listen

Prohibition has long been portrayed as a "noble experiment" that failed, a newsreel story of glamorous gangsters, flappers, and speakeasies. Now at last Lisa McGirr dismantles this cherished myth to reveal a much more significant history. Prohibition was the seedbed for a pivotal expansion of the federal government, the genesis of our contemporary penal state. Her deeply researched, eye-opening account uncovers patterns of enforcement still familiar today: the war on alcohol was waged disproportionately in African American, immigrant, and poor White communities. Alongside Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws, Prohibition brought coercion into everyday life and even into private homes.

This outstanding history also reveals a new genome for the activist American state, one that shows the DNA of the right as well as the left. It was Herbert Hoover who built the extensive penal apparatus used by the federal government to combat the crime spawned by Prohibition. The subsequent federal wars on crime, on drugs, and on terror all display the inheritances of the war on alcohol. McGirr shows the powerful American state to be a bipartisan creation, a legacy not only of the New Deal and the Great Society but also of Prohibition and its progeny.

©2016 Lisa McGirr (P)2021 Tantor
20th Century Social Social Policy United States War Thought-Provoking
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Very relevant

The entire book but especially the second half gives really good insight into the birth of the police and penal state that the US has become. Narrator was excellent.

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Snarky and Woke

A simplistic and mangled portrait of a very complex period in US history. The convergence of institutional religion, modern political impulses, global industrialization, the aftermath of World War 1, and the expansion of federal powers cannot be understood or appreciated when presented as solely as an anti religious screed. The tone and accents of the reader are just embarrassing and distracting.

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Reader is hard to follow.

Some factual observations. Overall, the reader is difficult to focus and stay focused on. I missed half of the book

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