Gentlemen Bootleggers: The True Story of Templeton Rye, Prohibition, and a Small Town in Cahoots
- Oct 19, 2016
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
To paraphrase the start of another reader's review: history and whiskey, what's not to love? Unfortunately, the answer is plenty. Had I been paying attention, the problem was laid bare in the book's subtitle, The True Story of Templeton Rye, Prohibition, and a Small Town in Cahoots, in which author Bryce Bauer made clear the sprawling ambition of the book. But he doesn't deliver, at least not consistently, and at a mere 235 pages of actual material, Gentlemen Bootleggers is both too long and too short by a rum-runner's country mile.
There's no doubt Bauer did his research, as the 36 pages of source notes and bibliography attest to. What's lacking, however, is enough primary material to adequately fill in the blanks. Instead there's an overabundance of exposition, speculation ("perhaps" gets a lot of use here), and padding (Al Capone keeps popping up in unrelated ways). As a result, despite the book's modest length, there were simply too many eye-glazing passages to consistently hold my attention.
Whether Bauer's problems could have been fixed by approaching the subject as historical fiction, by placing Templeton into the broader milieu of organized rural bootlegging operations throughout the Midwest (or by even acknowledging that there was, in fact, no analog to be found), by truly going bigger and weaving Templeton's story into the greater Prohibition narrative, or by bridging past and present by concluding with Templeton Rye's rebirth and its ascendancy in craft whiskey circles, I can't say. Never mind that Bauer doesn't even deliver on his own title: we never learn why these particular bootleggers are considered "gentlemen." I can say that John Hillcoat's film Lawless was more fun, that HBO's Boardwalk Empire, which I'm currently watching, is more compelling, and that nothing Gentlemen Bootleggers has done will alter my appreciation for Templeton Rye.
Comments