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The Reporters Who Took On a World at War
by Deborah Cohen
A prize-winning historian's revelatory account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism.
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.
"Northwestern University historian Cohen delivers an evocative portrait of a tight-knit coterie of American journalists who reported from the world's hot spots from the 1920s through the 1940s...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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Cohen's narrative reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue...An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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...[T]he resulting history is both unique and memorable." - Library Journal (starred review)
"The celebrated journalists of the lost generation were voracious, reckless, promiscuous, funny, and drunk, and they were also shrewd and deeply political. They raced toward disaster, interviewing the villainous and those they hoped would be heroes." - Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
"In this sterling book, Deborah Cohen follows a remarkable group of now mostly forgotten reporters as they try to make sense of a world turned upside down. The result is a shrewd and vivid work of history, one that combines deep research with lustrous narrative verve." - Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Embers of War and JFK
"A fresh, fast-paced history of the twentieth-century's most defining events through the eyes of the foreign correspondents who dashed off to cover them...a riveting narrative that unites public and private affairs with rare fluency and power." - Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch
This information about Last Call at the Hotel Imperial was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Deborah Cohen is the author of The War Come Home, Household Gods, and Family Secrets. She is also the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University, focusing on modern Europe.
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