RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"Wolraich’s account of the murder and the ensuing investigations, helmed by the former judge Samuel Seabury...is brick-dense yet propulsive. Unlike the sensationalist reporters of the era, Wolraich manages to handle even the seediest of underworlds with reportorial spareness and elegance, treating his material more as a nonfiction political thriller than a true-crime whodunit ... The book also provides a fascinating portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then New York’s governor, as he navigated the fallout from Gordon’s murder and the public’s demands to clean up the state’s snakes’ nests ... Equally unnerving is the book’s reminder of how infrequently and unevenly justice is meted out. While Wolraich justifiably marvels that Gordon’s murder led to the collapse of Tammany, this posthumous triumph was qualified by the fact that Gordon’s actual killers were exonerated by a jury.\
Ian Buruma
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewBuruma has long demonstrated an ability to depict even horrific wartime events with remove ... In The Collaborators, some readers may find Buruma’s permissiveness toward his subjects’ conduct and moral barometers unnerving, even disturbing. The author painstakingly lays out the discrepant historical evidence surrounding their most egregious actions. Yet in some instances, the existing, court-admissable evidence against them appears damning ... Buruma details her early years with interest, but fails to adequately underscore the trauma of being relegated to probable sexual slavery by one’s own parents; nor does he sufficiently explore the full impact that this brutalization might have had on her actions throughout her brief life ... Buruma successfully uses the three narratives to warn us about reckless charlatans in power today, and against the ongoing peril of kakistocracies. Yet in drilling down on this central conceit, Buruma arrives at an odd, off-putting conclusion ... Buruma’s choice to focus on this supporting-cast roster of individuals is no misstep. What would be, however, is a failure to drive home the greater lessons and conundrums that their tragic lives present.
Deborah Cohen
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review... bringing out disturbingly prescient material at exactly the right moment ... Much of Hotel Imperial is a distressing, immersive recounting of how denial, passivity and pacification aided the rise of authoritarian regimes. Cohen has tasked herself with the same outsized challenge that faced her subjects in real time: making the deluge of prewar events around the globe comprehensible to readers ... At times, Cohen succeeds; at others, torrents of historical details overwhelm the narrative, which Cohen has additionally burdened with extensive documentation of the correspondents’ sex lives, psychoanalysis adventures and marital woes. These sometimes pages-long interludes are speed bumps in the book, often coming just as electrifying and horrific events crescendo. The effect on the reader is comparable to the unsatisfying sex that Cohen documents in such tedious detail. Another challenge for Cohen (and for all authors of group biographies of this magnitude): stage-managing so many characters and story lines. Perhaps with this in mind, Cohen kindly includes a quick-reference \'dramatis personae\' guide at the front of the book ... Despite these handicaps, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is intermittently engrossing.
