Books about Prohibition from Amazon.com

Featuring hundreds of vintage photographs, postcards, brochures, and other materials evocative of time and place, Havana Before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground documents how the city of Havana evolved from Prohibition haven and rich man's playground to a heady blend of glittering nightclubs, outrageous cabarets, all-night bars, and backstreet brothels. Here, captured in one amazing book, is the drama, passion, intrigue, and opulence of a legendary city during its heyday-before the Castro dictatorship re-imagined the country and Americans were banned from travel to this tropical paradise.
An architectural historian by profession, Peter Moruzzi is an acknowledged expert on mid-century Modern architecture and design. He is the founder of the Palm Springs Modern Committee, an internationally recognized historic preservation organization, and the writer/director of Desert Holiday, a documentary film chronicling the history of Palm Springs as seen through vintage postcards. He resides in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles and in Palm Springs.
(20080515).
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The first book on Santería’s holiest divination system to thoroughly explore each family of odu and how their actions and reactions affect the spiritual development of the client.

• Includes the major considerations for sacrifice, providing the diviner with ways to placate and supplicate the Afro-Cuban deities known as orishas.

• Demonstrates how to properly end a reading so that negative vibrations are fully removed from the diviner's home.

• Provides a thoroughly detailed description of each of the 12 families of odu that exist in the diloggun--from Okana through Ejila Shebora.

The diloggun is more than a tool of divination. It is a powerful transformational process, and the forces that are set in motion when it is cast determine the future evolution of the adherent. The Diloggun is the first book to explore this Afro-Cuban oracle from the perspective of diaspora orisha worship. It is also the first book to explore the lore surrounding this mysterious oracle, which is the living Bible of one of the world's fastest growing faiths.

The twelve families of odu that are available to the diviner include 192 omo odu, the children of the odu, and each of these patterns or letters has its own proverbs, meanings, prohibitions, and sacrifices. Ocha'ni Lele provides the secret but essential information that the adept diviner needs to know to ensure that every element affecting a client's spiritual development is taken into consideration during a reading. His book is also the first to detail how to properly end a session so that negative vibrations are absorbed by the orishas and fully removed from the diviner's home. For those seeking the wisdom of ancient Africa, The Diloggun is an indispensable guide to the mysteries of the orishas.

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On January 16, 1920, America went dry. For the next thirteen years, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the making, selling, or transportation of "intoxicating liquors," heralding a new era of crime and corruption on all levels of society. Instead of eliminating alcohol, Prohibition spurred more drinking than ever before. Formerly law-abiding citizens brewed moonshine, became rumrunners, and frequented speakeasies. Druggists, who could dispense "medicinal quantities" of alcohol, found their customer base exploding overnight. So many people from all walks of life defied the ban that Will Rogers famously quipped, "Prohibition is better than no liquor at all." Here is the full, rollicking story of those tumultuous days, from the flappers of the Jazz Age and the "beautiful and the damned" who drank their lives away in smoky speakeasies to bootlegging gangstersÑPretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, Al CaponeÑand the notorious St. Valentine's Day Massacre. In an America still struggling with the problems of alcohol and drug dependency, Prohibition will strike an especially meaningful chord for today's readers..
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"We never shoot unless we know who is present," gang boss Tom Egan declared in a candid interview with a leading St. Louis newspaper Just who was this man who could boast in public about ordering murder? After nearly a century, the story of Egan's Rats can finally be told: how a group of Victorian-era street punks mushroomed into a powerful force that controlled Missouri's largest city for nearly thirty years.
Led by two childhood pals, Thomas "Snake" Kinney and Tom Egan, the Rats emerged from the city's Irish slums. They learned their trade the old-fashioned way, via robberies, brawls, burglaries, anad shootings. When Kinney ran on the Democratic ticket in the Third Ward, his friends were at the polls to ensure he got enough votes. For nearly ten years the gang cut a large swath in St. Louis, instilling fear wherever it went. With Snake Kinney a Missouri state senator, and Tom Egan St. Louis's most dangerous gangster, the gang boasted nearly 400 members. Nearly everyone who lived in St. Louis was touched by them in some way or another.
Soon the Rats became overconfident and careless, beginning with a public shooting war against a gang led by Missouri beverage inspector Edward "Jelly Roll" Hogan. When the once fearful public grew tired of theh gangs, their leadership ended up in federal prison for twenty-five years, largely on the testimony of one of their own who turned state's evidence in fear for his life.
Egan's Rats provides a fascinating glimpse into a past that wasn't always idyllic. It was an era in which roving gangs of thugs terrorized voters with impunity, when alcohol was illegal, when a gangster could brag of his power in the newspaper, and when the tendrils of St. Louis crime reached all the way into the White House..
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In 1919, the United States embarked on the country's boldest attempt at moral and social reform: Prohibition The 18th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol around the country. This "noble experiment," as President Hoover called it, was intended to usher in a healthier, more moral, and more efficient society. Nowhere was such reform needed more, proponents argued, than in New York City--and nowhere did Prohibition fail more spectacularly. Dry Manhattan is the first major work on Prohibition in nearly a quarter century, and the only full history of Prohibition in the era's most vibrant city.

Though New Yorkers were cautiously optimistic at first, Prohibition quickly degenerated into a deeply felt clash of cultures that utterly transformed life in the city. Impossible to enforce, the ban created vibrant new markets for illegal alcohol, spawned corruption and crime, fostered an exhilarating culture of speakeasies and nightclubs, and exposed the nation's deep prejudices. Writ large, the conflict over Prohibition, Michael Lerner demonstrates, was about much more than the freedom to drink. It was a battle between competing visions of the United States, pitting wets against drys, immigrants against old stock Americans, Catholics and Jews against Protestants, and proponents of personal liberty against advocates of societal reform.

In his evocative history, Lerner reveals Prohibition to be the defining issue of the era, the first major "culture war" of the twentieth century, and a harbinger of the social and moral debates that divide America even today.

(20070314).
Price: $11.24 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Ever wish you could be a fly on the wall during prohibition days? A guided tour awaits the reader in Wetter than the Mississippi: Prohibition in St. Louis and Beyond, published by Reedy Press. Old newspaper stories and oral history accounts bring to life this fascinating period, when the St. Louis area was awash in saloons and scandals. Author Robbi Courtaway has uncorked vintage reserves of anecdotal stories and lively narratives that focus on the greater St. Louis area, and span a 150-mile radius into Missouri and Illinois: Boonville, Jefferson City and Cape Girardeau, Mo., to Nauvoo, Decatur, Springfield, and deep southern Illinois. A double-length chapter at the center of the book details the 1920s-era gangs who specialized in bootleg booze and bloodshed in St. Louis and southern and central Illinois. Also featured are the brewing and wine industries, law enforcement, elected officials, the Ku Klux Klan, home brewers and amateur bootleggers, nightspots around town, a failed whiskey-siphoning scheme, a high-profile beer protection scandal, historical background of prohibition and more..
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" The Night Club Era should rate as a Broadway Koran. Other books on the subject are unnecessary if they agree with it, wrong if they differ from it, and in either case should be burned." -- Alva Johnston, from the Introduction

Written in the aftermath of Prohibition, Stanley Walker's The Night Club Era is a lively and idiosyncratic account of the people and places that defined New York's night life during the era of "the great American madness." Here we meet murderers and millionaires, gangsters, bartenders, celebrities of the stage, screen, and society, and a host of other colorful characters who populated the city's diverse night clubs, from El Fey to the Cotton Club. Walker relives the "night of incredulous sadness" on which the Volstead Act went into effect, visits a classic speakeasy, discussing the owner's delicate arrangements with policemen, prohibition agents, and bootleggers, and details the frequently brutal swindles practiced in the city's numerous clip joints and the tactics of the era's crime organizations, explaining precisely what happens when one is "taken for a ride." Among the larger-than-life night club habitués Walker sketches are Owney Madden, the elder statesman of the city's rackets; Walter Winchell, America's most influential columnist and the "brash historian of our life and times"; Mayor James J. Walker, who typified the gaudiness, smartness, and insouciance of the city he ran, yet was never too refined to shoot dice on hotel room floors; and Texas Guinan, the beloved entertainer, hostess, and entrepreneur who greeted customers with her trademark phrase "Hello, sucker!" Vividly told, The Night Club Era offers a singular, serious -- though never sober -- history of New York City during Prohibition.

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Testimony of a Catholic Priest Who Converted to Christianity

As a child, Chiniquy memorized scriptures at his mother's knee and developed a deep love for God. Becoming a priest, he wanted desperately to place full trust in his church, but was hit by waves of doubt as his church claimed adherence to the Gospel, yet violated it at every turn. His jealous superiors falsely accused him, but Abraham Lincoln, a young lawyer from Illinois, defended him and saved his reputation. Chiniquy proves that it was the Jesuits who later killed Lincoln, and explains why..
Price: $13.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]