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Faces Along The Bar Review
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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 many insightful facts and details concerning life in the late nineteenth century saloon, she often over exhausted certain topics which led to a loss of interest. When I first picked up this book I expected to read a novel. However, I was surprised when I realized that it was more of a historical documentary than a story. Perhaps this is why I had such a negative first impression. Regardless, I was fascinated by Powers’s plethora of facts and information. The author obviously had enough passion for the subject to spend the amount of time and effort that she did on such a project. In spite of this, the writing itself lacked the sort of emotional attachment that I had anticipated.
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