Booze

I was lucky enough to find a hardback copy of this book in excellent condition this spring. After perusing the inside jacket review, I took the book home and fell in love with it by the time I'd read fifteen pages. James Gray has written other books about Canadian history, and after reading this book, I plan on finding them because his writing style is clear without being simple and sophomoric. He described Western Canada's frontier settlers of the late 1800's and early 1900's so well that they jumped off the page. When I try to imagine the research the author must have done while writing this book, I am overwhelmed. His detailed recording of who did what, when, and why is also written from a factual, non-partial point of view. I appreciated this fact; he left no impression of who was right, the Wets or the Drys, only that history had been brushed under the rug, and he felt an obligation to piece together the entire puzzle for us, the readers. Along with a highly compact tale of how alcohol separated those who had different religious, political, and business affiliations, the book has a wonderful section of photographs from the time about which it was written. The bars pictured range from spartan in style to elaborately decorated, and yet they all have certain similarities that, when considered, suggested that the war for and against Prohibition spanned all economic classes. I was also impressed with the understated grace with with Gray used rare words. He does not write to sound educated, he writes to educate us, and it is this concise use of the right words at the right time - no matter how obscure - that I found so appealing. It's not every day that I read a book that sends me to a dictionary every fifteen to twenty pages. I recommend this book to anyone who thinks the United States was the only North American country torn apart by the controversy of Prohibition.