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.
