"During Prohibition, Seattle was awash in rumrunners delivering hooch to blind pigs - not to mention the many swampers and highbinders who helped bootleggers evade stool pigeons and dry agents. There's more slang where this came from (in addition to fascinating city history) in the book, "Seattle Prohibition: Bootleggers, Rumrunners & Graft in the Queen City." Local author and historian Brad Holden vividly illustrates this rough-and-tumble time in Seattle." -Crosscut "In a rapidly evolving city with little sense of its past, Brad Holden is Seattle's new, essential cultural historian. His book builds a better understanding of how we arrived at the present and does it with color, wit and artful storytelling." -Thomas Kohnstamm, author of "Lake City" "When you live in Seattle long enough, at a certain point you need to sit down and read a history that ties together the half-heard stories about vice dens and crooked cops you've pieced together from locals at the bar. Brad Holden's "Seattle Prohibition," a slim but dense account of Seattle shortly before, during and after Prohibition, is an excellent place to start. This is a riveting drama of plainly told facts." -The Stranger "An amazingly thorough book on an under-reported but hugely important phase of Seattle history. A lazier author would have settled for detailing the colorful characters, layers of corruption, and bizarre events that defined the Prohibition era, but Holden aims far higher: he takes care both to place Seattle’s complicated relationship with Prohibition in the context of Seattle history, and to show how the Prohibition era defined so much of the city’s subsequent history and character. A must-read for anyone interested in Seattle history—this book answers a lot of questions and fills in a lot of gaps in our ongoing civic story." -Fred Moody, author of "Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story"
"This is a captivating history of one of America's most colorful characters - Al Hubbard. Holden dives into the larger than life history of a man whose past intersects with rum running, spy rings, police informants, and psychedelics. Brilliantly told, Holden brings Hubbard's enigmatic character to life." -Erika Dyck Ph.D, Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, and author of Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. "This is the remarkable story of Captain Al Hubbard-- inventor, con man, secret agent, uranium entrepreneur, and indefatigable LSD apostle, who saw the light while high on psychedelics in the early 1950s and never looked back." - Martin A. Lee, author of Acid Dreams -- The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond "When Brad Holden first stumbled on 'Captain' Al Hubbard a few years ago, he found a crafty, Seattle rum-runner who'd achieved national celebrity during Prohibition. But Holden soon discovered that Hubbard's second act--as one of the key, hidden figures behind the psychedelic revolution of the 1960's--would prove even more extraordinary. In this groundbreaking attempt to peel back the many layers of myth and mystery that surround Hubbard's early life as a boy genius, bootlegger and spy, Holden lays out the epic life of a uniquely American character, a trickster who danced across the national stage for almost a half century. Holden, a dogged archaeologist of urban artifact and lore, performs an invaluable service by pulling together this compellingly readable introduction to 'The Captain'--a man whose late-in-life dream to change the world with psychedelics is still reverberating through the culture today." -Ken Dornstein, Emmy-winning producer of The Grateful Dead documentary, Long Strange Trip, and author of The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky: A True Story.
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