These journalists have been chronicled before, but Ms. Cohen, a history professor at Northwestern University, takes their story to a new level with prodigious research and sparkling prose. The book is a model of its kind. The author follows her subjects not only to the world’s flash points but also into their bedrooms and onto their psychoanalysts’ couches, documenting their news-chasing heroism and romantic treachery. They emerge as paragons of journalistic nerve whose flaws energized their accomplishments.
... 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.
In her luminous, extensively researched and beautifully written Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, historian Deborah Cohen brilliantly captures the complicated personal and professional lives of that period’s four most influential journalists, all close friends, who witnessed the rise of fascism and communism, the powder keg of the Middle East after the Balfour Declaration and much more ... Cohen’s book is a remarkable and exceptionally reader-friendly account of the lives of an extraordinary group of writers and people.
... riveting ... Cohen has a vivid eye for aesthetic details, even in scenes otherwise dominated by grisly action ... Cohen’s argument that the personal and political are intertwined, and that characters’ personal lives are shaped by global affairs, while compelling, occasionally feels a bit forced...But in other moments this framing shines, as she cites characters’ reflections on the dissolving borders between the personal and the political ... With the breezy scene-setting of a party reporter, the rigor of a scholar, and deep empathy for the humans behind these historic bylines, Cohen makes the correspondents come alive.
In her engrossing account of this era and the people who did more than simply report facts, Cohen successfully interweaves international events with personal histories, creating a narrative that is well-crafted and comprehensively researched. Based on the voluminous published works of Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheehan, and Thompson—as well as their letters, notes, diaries, and journals and those of their families, friends, and colleagues—the resulting history is both unique and memorable ... Highly recommended for readers who enjoy biographies, modern history, and politics.
... grips, excites and sometimes exhausts with its high-speed, four-lane storytelling. Cohen — a professor at Northwestern University — draws deftly and seamlessly on 70 collections of papers as she hurries these hyperactive lives down parallel tracks ... Cohen’s all-action narrative bursts with colour and incident, though at times it screams at you in 96-point headlines. She shows too how the circles of her quartet spread.
Cohen’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.
Cohen delivers an evocative portrait of a tight-knit coterie of American journalists who reported from the world’s hot spots from the 1920s through the 1940s ... Drawing on extensive archival material, Cohen vividly describes the privation Knickerbocker saw in Russia under Stalin’s Five-Year Plan ... Interwoven with these and other historical events are immersive accounts of the correspondents’ extramarital affairs, divorces, bereavements, and literary endeavors. Striking a masterful balance between the personal and the political, this ambitious and eloquent account brings a group of remarkable people—and their tumultuous era—to vivid life.
... scintillating ... Cohen’s narrative reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue ... An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops.
