RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksCohen’s lucid prose makes for easy and engaging reading — one longs to lounge in the book’s eponymous hotel in Vienna ... Cohen’s latest book is a masterclass in playing with scale: individual lives and global affairs, the personal and the public brought together with each informing the other ... Cohen’s book is also a refreshing turn away from other popular narratives of the interwar years, too often overburdened with glitz and gimlets ... The pacing of Last Call, however, is at times uneven. At its best, the book feels like the most vital, engrossing letter — Dorothy Thompson’s expulsion from Germany, personally ordered by Hitler, or Vienna on the eve of Engelbert Dollfuss’s assassination come to mind — while at others it becomes bogged down with historical events or minute details of its subjects’ lives ... Perhaps most importantly for a book like this one, Cohen has written an exciting story — one that feels like a conversation between friends, overheard above the clinking of glasses and the peal of laughter in an overcrowded bar.
