Moonshine Memories - Softcover

Thomas R. Allison

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1603060065 ISBN 13: 9781603060066

Publisher: NewSouth Books, 2007

Synopsis

For 25 years, Tom Allison was a revenuer, a federal agent charged with enforcement of the nation’s laws on taxation of liquor. His territory was the hills, hollows and deep woods of Alabama, and his quarry was the illegal whiskey makers. Allison remembers the stake-outs in the brush, the undercover assignments, the long waits to catch the distillery operators red-handed, and, of course, the chases as he and his fellow treasury agents ran down fleeing moonshiners in the dark of night. While Allison is a natural story-teller, the characters who populate this history are too strange to be fiction. Perhaps the only thing more striking than the ignorance of many of the moonshiners is the craftiness of some others.

About this title

About the Author:

Tom Allison is now retired and lives in Montgomery, Alabama. He is a graduate of Huntingdon College and Jones School of Law.

From Publishers Weekly:

This book of tales from Allison's three decades as a federal agent raiding illegal liquor operations in the South stems from stories he told his grandchildren. Though they are colorful evocations of a period that no longer exists, he fails to persuade that these stories deserve a wide audience. Allison has a certain charm as he describes his hardscrabble fellow agents who combed the rural byways in the 1950s, '60s and '70s, searching for stills and outsmarting often dim-witted moonshiners. The few pages he devotes to the decline of illegal liquor activity are interesting and leave one thirsting for more. Perhaps it's the range of eclectic people he worked with and encountered (like a naked moonshiner) that allow him to say, "I was very fortunate to have had a job that I enjoyed so much." The judges Allison describes are also characters, although some readers may be appalled by their propensity to convict. Allison's gushing fondness for his longtime wife is refreshing, as is his joy in the life he has led. But his unqualified insistence on employing the term "Negro" because it was the term used then, and his apparent disdain for the changes in race relations that he has witnessed--stating, for example, "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was one of the most drastic laws that Congress had ever passed"--are unlikely to win him many readers outside of his home region. 8 pages illus.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1603060065
• ISBN 13: 9781603060066
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384