Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, by Mark Lawrence Schrad, Oxford University Press, 725 pages, $34.95
Mark Lawrence Schrad thinks Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding vigilante who rampaged through saloons at the beginning of the 20th century, gets a bum rap. While Nation was "easy to mock as a Bible-thumping 'crank,' 'a freak,' 'a lunatic,' or a 'puritanical killjoy,'" Schrad says, she was actually a courageous and kindly woman devoted to "justice, love, and benevolence." Her enemy "was not the drink or the drinker, but 'the man who sells,'" Schrad, a Villanova political scientist, writes in Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition. "This is important."
