Staff Picks: Banquets, Bootleggers, Bumbling Entrepreneurs

Ray Johnson, Untitled (Jasper Johns, James Dean with Coca-Cola), 1993, collage on board, 8 1/2″ x 18″. Image via Matthew Marks Gallery

“For more than thirty years Garland Bunting has been engaged in capturing and prosecuting men and women in North Carolina who make and sell liquor illegally.” Such is the modest first sentence of Alec Wilkinson’s , a book-length portrait of a backwoods law-enforcement genius. First published in 1985, this is old-fashioned reporting at its best: funny, low-key, sneakily poignant—the back into print! —