Why did I love this book?
This is one of the best books I have read in many years.
In a time when foreign correspondents always traveled first class, it tells the fascinating story of four reporters, John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, correspondents who took on dictators while rewriting the rules of modern journalism.
Glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone, they roamed Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, detailing the rise of fascism and its likely impact on the world order.
In the process, they landed interviews with the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, Nehru, and Gandhi and helped shape American views of the wider world.
3 authors picked Last Call at the Hotel Imperial as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • 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
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, BookPage
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,…