Faces Along Bar: Lore and Order in Workingman's Saloon, 1870-1920, by Madelon Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xii + 323 pp., $25.00 (cloth). It has been said that curse of working class, but Madelon Powers, social historian at University of New Orleans, will have none of that. In a lovingly crafted and well-told account of workingmen's saloons from 1870 until Noble Experiment, neighborhood tavern variously rendered as a source of class identity and gender solidarity, a doorway into careers, trades, and occupations, a recruitment station for cultural, ethnic, and other neighborhood organizations, a bank and a day labor outlet, a central node in web of patronage and mobilization that was urban political machine-in short, as essence of urban working-class culture. The saloon was the point of entry into social, economic, and political (p. 70) of urban working-class communities. In detailing role that saloons in lives and communities of American workingman (they were overwhelmingly male), Powers rewrites a history that has long been held hostage by two equally potent but misleading lines of inquiry: joyless labor historians of left, who insist that true history of working class can be known only through shop floor and union hall; and anti-drink moralists of center and right-the Anti-Saloon Leaguers, Prohibitionists, and Temperance reformers whose considerable historical corpus is so fanatically anti-liquor and so obviously based on wild imaginings rather than careful observation that it nearly useless except as a foil for presentation of facts (p. 5). Granted, what workingmen did in shops and factories, what they talked about, how they related to one another and to bosses are important elements in history of class. But so too are bars and taverns that provided drink, companionship, and a sense of community once working day had ended. Granted too, alcohol destroyed more than one man and his family-and still does! Yet workers built a community around drink (p. 6), a community to which historians must surely pay some heed. This not a survey of alcoholism or its effects among urban workers, nor a study of town drunks, drifters, and public inebriates; even less it an exegesis on evils of drink. It a historical ethnography of saloon-goers, of habitues developing potentialities of bar life to fullest (p. 7). A distinguishing feature of regulars wherewithal to be steady buyers of drink. Clubbing-the act of buying rounds and elaborate (if unwritten) rules and rituals surrounding that act-is so central to lore and order of workingman's saloon that Powers devotes three chapters to its analysis. What would compel a workingman, or anyone, to return night after night to same establishment, sharing rounds and camaraderie with same cast of regulars? To pose question to answer it. The saloons offered food and drink, games and amusements, conversation and companionshipall basic amenities of home sans women and children (whose absence was certainly part of attraction). In an era when homes of workingmen and their families were rarely more than tenement hovels, appeal of saloons and their comfortable sociability obvious. The TV sitcom Cheers understood completely that sometimes you gotta go where everybody knows your name. The saloons also provided access to local institutions, and this too was part of their appeal and larger social function. The workingmen's bars played host to nearly every political, labor, fraternal, ethnic, and social organization that a workingman might care to join (p. …