KYL - Iowa's Prohibition & Bootlegging Author Ann Kotz

Description

Moonshine by Moonlight by Ann Hanigan Kotz Bookpress Publishing book review by Kate Robinson 'Rye whiskey from Templeton, Iowa was as well-known as the Great Bambino.' Kotz smoothly melds historical research with storytelling panache in her third historical novel. This fascinating tale of the rural bootlegging industry in Carroll County, Iowa, is vividly portrayed during the Prohibition years that extend into the early years of the Great Depression. As farmers become desperate to pay their mortgages and support their families while crops fail and income disappears, many turn to the fine art of distilling whiskey “by the light of the moon.” Quite often, local law enforcement and local courts look away as barns and farm outbuildings become secret distilleries and storage rooms for the illicit bottles and barrels of moonshine. In many cases, even when federal regulators rather than local lawmen arrest moonshiners, relatively light fines or short jail sentences are levied, even as bootlegging morphs rapidly from personal use to a significant professional network supplying Des Moines, Sioux City, and Omaha for distribution to many other Midwestern locations, including Chicago. Kotz’s writing is tight and even-handed, with a down-to-earth sensibility. The action of the core story is peppered with an occasional chapter in the voice of the virtually anonymous bootleg kingpin in western Iowa, providing a strong personal point of view in a multilayered narrative style. The well-rounded characters include the honorable but reluctant farmers caught up in surviving the Depression, the local lawmen and judges who balance upholding the law with protecting community members to maintain social order, and the more colorful and criminally minded entrepreneurs and apprentices who organize and execute the distribution of necessary supplies, storage, and transportation of the illicit product. The new yet timeless industry stirs up conflict in Templeton, placing staunch, teetotaling Scandinavian Protestants at odds with the lively German Catholics whose cultural norm is celebrating life with a brew or a bottle in hand. RECOMMENDED by the US Review