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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
"She shows too how the circles of her quartet spread."
"Based on the voluminous published works of Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheehan, and Thompson—as well as their letters, notes, diaries, and journals and those of their families, friends, and colleagues—the resulting history is both unique and memorable ..."
"Perhaps with this in mind, Cohen kindly includes a quick-reference 'dramatis personae' guide at the front of the book ..."
"At its best, the book feels like the most vital, engrossing letter — Dorothy Thompson's expulsion from Germany, personally ordered by Hitler, or Vienna on the eve of Engelbert Dollfuss's assassination come to mind — while at others it becomes bogged down with historical events or minute details of its subjects' lives ..."
"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."
"Cohen's narrative reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue ..."
"Cohen's book is a remarkable and exceptionally reader-friendly account of the lives of an extraordinary group of writers and people."
"These journalists have been chronicled before, but Ms."
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