Today's nonfiction post is on
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War by Deborah Cohen. It is 557 pages long and is published by Random House. The cover is red with a typewriter on the bottom. The intended reader is someone who is interested in recent history. There is some foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.
From the dust jacket- 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.
Review- This is an interesting book about the reporters who changed the way reporting was done and influenced the future with their more personal styles. Cohen does some fantastic research into the lives and careers of her subjects, from personal dairies and letters to the books and articles they wrote over the course of the careers. The over all narrative is about their lives after World War 1 and through World War 2. The politics of the times is fully explored from conservative to liberal and those phrases meant in their time. The epilogue gives their ends and how their lived after the wars. Their stories are interesting, moving, and insightful about the times they lived through. If you are interesting in recommend history and how reporters influenced it, you should read this book.
I give this book a Five out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.
