Read this prize-winning historian's immersive ( New York Times) account of the famous writers
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 splendour of a first-class sleeper
car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered they chased deposed empresses
international financiers and Balkan gunrunners 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: 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. In
those tumultuous years they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler Franco and Mussolini who
sought to persuade them of fascism's inevitable triumph. Nehru and Gandhi also courted them
seeking American allies against British imperialism. Churchill saw them as his best shot at
convincing a reluctant America to join the war against Hitler. They committed themselves to the
cause of freedom: fiercely and with all its hazards. They argued about love war sex death
and everything in between and they wrote it all down. The fault lines that ran through a
crumbling world they would find ran through their own marriages and friendships too. Told
with the immediacy of a conversation overheard this revelatory book captures how the global
upheavals of the twentieth century felt to live through up close.
