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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War
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About This Book
They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther's Death Be Not Proud--a memoir about his son's death from cancer--but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean's Dorothy and Red, about Thompson's fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
Reviews
"In her engrossing account of this era and the people who did more than simply report facts, Cohen successfully interweaves international events with personal histories, creating a narrative that is well-crafted and comprehensively researched."
"Cohen, a history professor at Northwestern University, takes their story to a new level with prodigious research and sparkling prose."
"In her luminous, extensively researched and beautifully written Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, historian Deborah Cohen brilliantly captures the complicated personal and professional lives of that period's four most influential journalists, all close friends, who witnessed the rise of fascism and communism, the powder keg of the Middle East after the Balfour Declaration and much more ..."
"Cohen — a professor at Northwestern University — draws deftly and seamlessly on 70 collections of papers as she hurries these hyperactive lives down parallel tracks ..."
"Perhaps most importantly for a book like this one, Cohen has written an exciting story — one that feels like a conversation between friends, overheard above the clinking of glasses and the peal of laughter in an overcrowded bar."
"Striking a masterful balance between the personal and the political, this ambitious and eloquent account brings a group of remarkable people—and their tumultuous era—to vivid life."
"Much of Hotel Imperial is a distressing, immersive recounting of how denial, passivity and pacification aided the rise of authoritarian regimes."
"An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops."
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