
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial
The Reporters Who Took On a World at War
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Toren
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By:
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Deborah Cohen
WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE • A prize-winning historian’s “effervescent” (The New Yorker) 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
“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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Critic reviews
“As effervescent, for more than four hundred pages, as its winsome and hyperactive characters, and it blends scholarly attention to ideas like psychoanalysis and Wilsonian liberal internationalism with novelistic renderings of these writers’ dizzying trajectories abroad.”—The New Yorker
“As they follow Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Americans are getting an inkling of what it felt like eight decades ago when fascist dictators were on the brink of plunging Europe into war. . . . Back then the best source of news was an intrepid band of young American newspaper correspondents whose exclusive dispatches brought home word of the coming cataclysm. . . . [Ms. Cohen] takes their story to a new level with prodigious research and sparkling prose. The book is a model of its kind.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Deborah Cohen has done a remarkably powerful, enlightening and entertaining job of bringing back to life a quartet of long gone reporters. . . . Cohen writes with easy authority and a powerful narrative drive. This is a great book about great and flawed people caught up in a world going mad.”—Chicago Tribune
John Gunther, Dorothy Thompson, Jimmie Sheehan and H. Knickerbocker (and some others) - became America's "eyes and ears" concerning the rising threat of Fascism (Franco, Mussolini, Hitler) and Totalitarianism (Stalin).
Cohen tells their story at both a personal and professional level - how they 'bagged' interviews with Dictators and etc.
I was more interested in how the reporters thought about covering the Dictators, got their interviews and argued with their Editors about the correct nature/slant/objectivism of their reporting. I think the idea of how to report events - outside the United States, back to people within the United States in a way that 'tells them what is happening' - but without 'blatant advocacy' - is a relevant problem today.
Some of these people were 'larger than life' - with bouts of drinking, affairs, ruined marriages yet insight on what was happening and projections about what was going to happen.
All things must pass though - the crew depicted was outshone by others during the later stages of the War (Ed Murrow, Harry Reasoner, Eric Sevaried) - then later in a new medium Walter Cronkite.
Interesting perspectives of reporters who saw history; reported it and made some history themselves.
Should be of interest to those who have an interest in the inter-war years 1919-1939 in Europe.
Carl Gallozzi
InterWar Years details of reporters' notebook
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exceptional research great story
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A bit of history told through global journalists.
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Is History Going To Repeat Itself
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I’m not crazy about the narrator. She has a nice, clear voice and pronunciation, but she tends to read everything in the same overly dramatic tone whether a character is discussing the menace of Hitler or ordering a ham sandwich. Still, I highly recommend the book, which will take you back to a world that no longer is.
The Days of Swashbuckling Foreign Correspondents
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Poorly written
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Suzanne Toren is a favorite narrator. She narrates with clarity and feeling. Overall, this is an outstanding history.
Globetrotters
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A remarkably powerful experience
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Awesome!
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Not what I was expecting
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