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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial
The Reporters Who Took On a World at War
2 of 2 copies available
“High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.”—Financial Times
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE AND THE RALPH WALDO EMERSON AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE PROSE AWARD
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, NPR, BookPage, Booklist
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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
March 15, 2022 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593416341
- File size: 543432 KB
- Duration: 18:52:08
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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This ensemble biographical audiobook traces the reportage, lives, and loves of four correspondents who covered the years leading up to WWII. Each was successful in their own right, and some, like John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson, whose columns and radio show reached millions, became household names. Suzanne Toren brings a clipped Mid-Atlantic accent to her narration, which is perfect for the time and locale. Hearing how Thompson dismissed Hitler as a "little man" makes the listener appreciate that journalism is indeed the first draft of history. Unfortunately, the audiobook is too invested in the reporters' personal lives, which get in the way of the most important story. L.W.S. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from January 10, 2022
Northwestern University historian Cohen (Family Secrets) 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. Stationed in European capitals, with forays to Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean, Dorothy Thompson, John Gunther, and his wife, Frances, covered the fall of empires, the spread of communism, and the rise of fascism. Influenced by Freudianism and anti-colonialist struggles, they fashioned “a new kind of journalism, both more subjective and more intimate,” Cohen writes, and stimulated a growing American interest in foreign affairs. Drawing on extensive archival material, Cohen vividly describes the privation Knickerbocker saw in Russia under Stalin’s Five-Year Plan; Thompson’s 1931 sit-down with Hitler, whom she called “the very prototype of the Little Man”; Sheean’s marveling at the “dogged defiance” of ordinary Spaniards during the Spanish Civil War; and the Gunthers’ witnessing of the 1934 July Putsch in Austria. Interwoven with these and other historical events are immersive accounts of the correspondents’ extramarital affairs, divorces, bereavements, and literary endeavors. 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. Agent: Kathy Robbins, the Robbins Agency.
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