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
• 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.
