“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
“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
“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”
“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 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 believe it or not, mellows out when he enters a psychedelic chapter in his life. 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.”
“An engaging biography about the mysterious Al Hubbard, who helped pioneer psychedelic therapy and is credited by Stan Grof with developing the model of the high dose inner-directed session to catalyze a mystical experience.”
-Rick Doblin, Ph.D., founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
"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, Acid Dreams -- The Complete Social History of LSD: The CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond
“Lost Roadhouses of Seattle details a wild and untamed period in Seattle’s history. It tells of prohibition and prostitution and illicit dance halls and all variety of gin joints, gambling dens, and dimly lit speakeasies. It is a rollicking good read!”
-Seattle Refined
“In a nod to Seattle’s naughty past, the book showcases more than 60 dance halls and speakeasies on the city’s outskirts whose heyday formed during Prohibition. From the north-end Duffy’s Tavern to the south-end Spanish Castle, it’s like the old Lay’s potato chip commercial: you can’t read about just one.”
-The Seattle Times
“Lost Roadhouse of Seattle explores the link between prohibition and the roadhouses that sprung up just beyond the city limits. This book really opened my eyes to the sheer number of stories that our region can tell.”
-Northwest Prime Time
“Historians Brad Holden and Peter Blecha explore almost 60 of Puget Sound’s most decadent and debaucherous nightclubs in their new book, many of which were located north of the Emerald City”
-Everett Herald