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Biography & Autobiography. History. Politics. Nonfiction. HTML:WINNER OF THE MARK LYNTON HISTORY PRIZE â?˘ A prize-winning historianâ??s â??effervescentâ?ť (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 â??High-speed, four-lane storytelling . . . Cohenâ??s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident.â?ťâ??Financial Times NEW YORK TIMES EDITORSâ?? CHOICE â?˘ WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITH BOOK PRIZE â?˘ 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 Guntherâ??s Death Be Not Proudâ??a memoir about his sonâ??s death from cancerâ??but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheeanâ??s Dorothy and Red, about Thompsonâ??s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the globa… (more)
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If you enjoy gossip, this may be the volume for you. The men and women discussed here were all heavy drinkers and sharing one another in the bedroom. One extremely sad story included is about the Gunthers' son Johnny who developed brain cancer in his early teens and eventually died which John Gunther chronicled in his book, "Death Be Not Proud".
Correspondents included are the Gunthers, H. R. Nickerkerbocker, Dorothy Thompson and James Sheean plus some of their famous connections such as Nehru, Harold Nicolson, William Shier, and Rebecca West.
Here is a tidbit: Emily "Mickey" Hahn reported from Shanghai which was the fifth largest city in the world. In 1935 when she arrived, the police there recorded removing 29,000 corpses of people who had starved to death.
This group of writers were, for the most part, strongly against fascism, in particular because it submerged the individual in the politics of the movement. The stories filed by these bold journos were the first to warn against Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler.
Dorothy Thompson wrote that it wasn't just the Nazi assault on minorities, it was that the fascists wanted to eliminate individuality itself. (p284)
Their positions on communism were more mixed, as was common in the era. Their praise for the excellent idea of progress through common effort and their witness to the rapid strides the USSR made in modernization gave way to increasing dismay at Stalin's crimes.
Deborah Cohen is a skilled historian and writer who brings us into the barrooms, households and bedrooms of her subjects. Frank but not prurient. The cast of characters is huge and readers who won't be reading straight through might need to refer to the index to keep everyone straight.
After the war and Nuremburg, the wartime urgency and drive trickles away. New reporters and new political realities take over and these older correspondents start to retire from the public arena. They write books and are the subject of books, and serve largely as role models for the new reporters who will take the lessons learned into the Vietnam war era.
I found the book thrilling and recommend it highly.
For an excellent longer take on this book, the New Yorker review by Krithika Varagur,
March 17, 2022 is online.