In this meticulously researched work, Lisa Andersen provides a detailed examination of a rather neglected organization within America's temperance history – the Prohibition Party – at the same time as exploring the consequences and limitations of various political reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing, she offers numerous important insights into the diverse methods and goals of various temperance organizations, the process by which national prohibition was written into the American Constitution, the roles of minor and major parties within American politics, and American political culture as a whole.

The book will undoubtedly be of great interest to students and scholars of temperance, prohibition and alcohol history, for whom the campaigns and achievements of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the Anti-saloon League (ASL) have often overshadowed those of the Prohibition Party. Most significantly, Andersen teases out the intricate relationships between the Prohibition Party and these other organizations, with considerable sensitivity devoted to the difference between official party policy and rhetoric, and what was happening at a local level amongst the rank and file. The extensive roles played by women as party members, leaders and organizers, in the context of an unsteady commitment to women's suffrage and changing levels of allegiance with the WCTU, are explored in great detail. Their legacy, in terms of providing an armoury of fundraising, legal and direct-action methods for male prohibitionists, is particularly well drawn. Similarly, the party's refusal to support the national prohibition amendment campaign, spearheaded by the ASL in the mid-1910s, is dissected lucidly, at the same time as it is shown that party members, committed to the ideal of a sober society, cooperated considerably with the grassroots organizations that the ASL helped to mobilize. That the party's insistence on the undemocratic and unenforceable nature of the proposed amendment fell on largely deaf ears – until the Repeal movement took up the same arguments – serves to highlight forcefully the frustrated ambitions of a reform-orientated minor party in early twentieth-century America.

It is in this analysis of the party's opposition to the national prohibition amendment campaign that Andersen most fully and satisfyingly achieves the book's overarching aim: to use the Prohibition Party, a marginal political group, as a means of exploring the consequences and limits of political reform in the Progressive Era. Above all, the party's objection to the amendment grew from a larger rejection of nonpartisan pressure groups as a means of advocating for new political issues. Without a strong party-political mandate, the prohibitionists believed that even if prohibition laws could be passed, those in positions of political power would lack the will and means to enforce them. Andersen shows that this was not simply an argument that grew out of the prohibition amendment debate, but was the Prohibition Party's much longer-term, consistent view of the appropriate roles of major and minor parties within democratic systems. In the face of several waves of reform that contributed to the marginalization of minor parties, the prohibitionists defended their position and their view of a healthy, inclusive, representative democracy through various means, including the rejection of the landmark national prohibition campaign of the 1910s.

Other tactics pursued by the Prohibition Party in the service of their vision of democracy are equally fascinating, if not always so lucidly explained by Andersen, including the party's adoption of the discourse of “strenuousness” instigated by Theodore Roosevelt. While this section raised many interesting threads of analysis – the strenuous femininity of Carry Nation, alcohol as a drain on masculine strenuousness, the party's advocation of a strenuous body politic – the discussion was less cohesive than in other parts of the book. Andersen's exploration of the building of utopian dry cities, however, was better integrated into the work's overall trajectory. The investment in and construction of prohibitionist towns, such as Harriman, Tennessee, are shown to be a direct response to the Prohibitionists' electoral disappointment in the late 1880s and the threat to minor parties posed by the introduction of the secret ballot. Through such means, Andersen reveals that the prohibitionists aimed to find a meaningful place for minor parties in the political system by “doing politics in a dramatically different style” (189).

With such an emphasis on the party system, political reforms and political culture, therefore, Andersen's work will be just as essential reading for students and scholars of American political history as it is for those more specifically interested in the history of temperance and prohibition. The Prohibition Party may have been a marginal political group, but its history, as told by Lisa Andersen, reveals an enormous amount about the century-long anti-liquor debate, the landscape of political discourse and change in which this debate took place, and the mechanics of mainstream politics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.