Faces Along The Bar Review

The book Faces Along the Bar by Madelon Powers is a documentary that illustrates life in the saloon between the years of 1870 and 1920. From the camaraderie of fellow saloon-goers to the politics of the average barroom; Powers covers, in great detail, the inner workings of saloons and clubs during this time period. She relates tales of early bar-goers and the rules of conduct of the barroom itself. While the book is extremely informative, it also becomes redundant at times. Powers spends almost as much time explaining elementary terms and words as she does writing about what saloon life was actually like. Though I did learn a lot from Powers’s work, I found it hard to read more than one chapter at a time for this very reason. The beginning of the book caught my attention, but after the first few chapters I found that the amount of explanation on certain topics had become tedious and it did little to pique my interest. In this paper, I intend to prove that although Powers gave ...