Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War: Cohen, Deborah: 9780525511199: Amazon.com: Books (original) (raw)
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Customers find the writing quality wonderful, exciting, and compelling. They describe the story as interesting, fascinating, and insightful. Readers also find the characters engaging and describe the book as entertaining. However, some feel the book has too much detail about the reporters' lives and lacks details of the many interviews with people in leadership.
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10 customers mention "Writing quality"10 positive0 negative
Customers find the writing quality wonderful, exciting, and compelling. They describe the book as an excellent read. Readers also appreciate the carefully crafted, witty writing.
"...And John Gunther, a fabulously successful author, who, if remembered at all today, is known for his searing book on his young son’s last year of life..." Read more
"...Deborah Cohen, a professor at Northwestern, is a very talented writer who has dug deep into archives, personal papers, and diaries to paint a..." Read more
"...Read the book. It is beautifully written." Read more
"...Cohen’s latest is a terrific piece of historical excavation, wonderfully written and very timely. Her main characters—John Gunther...." Read more
9 customers mention "Storytelling quality"9 positive0 negative
Customers find the story interesting, fascinating, and remarkable. They say it's an excellent story with historical accuracy. Readers also mention the book is entertaining and insightful.
"...pages and paragraphs that ultimately resulted in this remarkable and timely historical piece...." Read more
"...Deborah Cohen has woven an extremely compelling narrative using the lives of four prominent journalists of the interwar period to tell the story of..." Read more
"...Deborah Cohen’s latest is a terrific piece of historical excavation, wonderfully written and very timely. Her main characters—John Gunther...." Read more
"The book was written in an exciting and compelling manner. The account of the lives of four famous and..." Read more
4 customers mention "Character development"4 positive0 negative
Readers find the characters engaging.
"...The author really brings the characters to life in an engrossing and comprehensive manner...." Read more
"...forties. Their personalities come alive!" Read more
"This book had an excellent story and engaging characters even as they were actual people in history. Excellent read!" Read more
"An excellent "social biography"..." Read more
3 customers mention "Entertainment value"3 positive0 negative
Customers find the book entertaining and interesting.
"I am going to read this book. It sounded like it would be very interesting." Read more
"As entertaining as it is informative, this book takes the reader through the reporting of WW2 from the standpoint of the key correspondents at the..." Read more
"...A wonderfully entertaining and insightful experience which has application in today's climate." Read more
3 customers mention "Readability"3 positive0 negative
Customers find the book absorbing, wonderfully written, and timely.
"I found this book very absorbing and read it quickly...." Read more
"...a terrific piece of historical excavation, wonderfully written and very timely. Her main characters—John Gunther...." Read more
3 customers mention "Detail"0 positive3 negative
Customers find the book has too much detail about the reporters' lives. They also say it reads like a novel and doesn't offer a complete story of the rise of dictators.
"...Other reviewers have criticized the book because it doesn't offer a complete story of the rise of dictators and fascists...." Read more
"...The book reads like a novel. Missing are details of the many interviews with people in leadership positions...." Read more
"Way too much detail about the reporters lives that I had no interest to learn.Looking for more insight into what led to the war" Read more
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Reviewed in the United States on April 20, 2022
“Inside History”
The term "inside baseball" denotes the unseen elements of the game, the hard work behind seemingly effortless results. There is a similar process in researching and writing good history.
Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle within a puzzle. But you create the pieces, many don’t fit and are tossed away, and the first job is trying to make sense of it all. The pieces come from notes pulled from old correspondence, newspaper clips, diaries, and other sources, mounting up to a perplexing pile.
Next, sort through these pieces in hopes of finding some coherent pattern, overarching themes. Then, arrange these pieces around those themes. This is far from the last step. Can these bits be organized in an understandable matter, the pieces put together in a way that tells a story? And if that is achieved, how to present the material in an interesting way? Take it to the next level. Are there ways to share the pieces in a narrative? Can skillful transitions carry the story along not only effortlessly but holds the readers attention, leaving her or him anticipating the next section? If it is a book, can you sustain all this over 200 to 400 pages?
Always it is a battle, a pitched struggle to organize those pesky pieces you retain (a great many remain unused), followed by searching the brain for words to form clear sentences and then, revision, revision, revision. At the end, one hopes that most of the hurdles described above were cleared. It is rare to check all these boxes and put between the covers an important story that, to the reader, tells itself. And if you can do all that, your name is Deborah Cohen, and your book is Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War.
The book focuses on a group of foreign correspondents—John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. Internationally known figures from the 1920s through the early 1950s, each confronted the rise of fascism, Adolph Hitler, and lesser-known dictators who led the run-up to World War II. Their confrontations with these forces and attempts to warn a disinterested world of the bloodbath around the corner seem particularly appropriate today. This becomes clearer while reading Vincent Sheean’s Not Peace But a Sword written in the late 1930s, wherein he recounted Mussolini and Hitler’s tactics and designs in places such as Austria, Ethiopia, Spain, and Czechoslovakia.
“Colorful” and “brilliant” are good words to describe the main four characters and the supporting cast—Marcel Fodor, Frances Gunther, Rebecca West, and Jawaharlal Nehru. Cohen manages to coherently track all these characters’ orbits in and out of each other’s lives and their reckonings with international madness. A reader is hard-pressed not to gain new appreciation for events in today’s Ukraine as Cohen tells the story of Czechoslovakia’s abandonment by England and France. Or shudder at the similarity of Nazi tactics in Vienna, including the assassination of Austria’s prime minister, with January 6, 2021, in the United States.
Thanks to Cohen, we have a work that is a close as we are likely to get to a biography of Vincent Sheean or, as his friends knew him, “Jimmy.” His story begins in the small, coal mining town of Pana. He has long been an interest of mine, having first wrote about him in 1977 for a Decatur, Illinois newspaper two years after his 1975 death. By the time he passed in Italy from lung cancer, Sheean was forgotten. Or, as H.G. Wells' one-time mistress, Rebecca West, told him, "Too bad you didn't die young and earn yourself a small part in the memories of Americans who can read." (p. 498)
One of the minor themes of Cohen’s book is main character’s awareness that they were being forgotten as they aged.
Dorothy Thompson, one of the most powerful woman journalists of her time, no, one of the best-known and respected journalists of her era, is another we should know more about. Thompson actually crashed a Nazi rally in New York City before the war to boo and heckle the speakers. And John Gunther, a fabulously successful author, who, if remembered at all today, is known for his searing book on his young son’s last year of life, Death Be Not Proud. Knickerbocker was a new discovery for me. Like the others, he was a hard drinker. In fact, at Cohen accounts the extent of her characters’ alcoholism, a reader wonders how they got any work done. Perhaps they drank to deal with the scenes they covered, the world they saw coming, and the suffering they witnessed, the “small” deaths of innocents caught up in the egos of Mussolini, Hitler, and the war criminal, Francisco Franco of Spain.
Reading this book, I could not help thinking of my friend and former colleague, Steve Hurst, a Decatur man, who decades later followed a path like that of Cohen’s subjects. Working for the Associated Press, NBC, and CNN, the former Decatur Herald city editor covered wars, the fall of the Soviet Union, America’s invasions of Iraq and other topics. One hopes that he will tell his own story someday.
Cohen has given us not only an important book but one that is accessible to most readers. There surely cannot be a collection of papers or relevant archive that she has not scoured. And assembling those pieces, she tells a story capturing both a reader’s attention and heart. If you want to see how to research and write history in a powerful way and read a book with much to say about our past and our present, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial waits for you to turn the first page.
29 people found this helpful
Reviewed in the United States on March 17, 2024
I found this book very absorbing and read it quickly. Deborah Cohen, a professor at Northwestern, is a very talented writer who has dug deep into archives, personal papers, and diaries to paint a portrait of this group of reporters who worked in the '20s, '30s, and '40s. This book certainly sparked my interest in Dorothy Thompson, a trailblazing woman political columnist and foreign correspondent who was expelled from Nazi Germany because of her reporting. Her published works have been added to my must-read list, which is now inpossibly long.
There are engrossing sections about the journalists' dilemma, where they are expected to be objective but feel a duty to take sides and call attention to foreign governments' amassing of power and oppression of their people. I was struck by certain passages, such as the one on page 159 describing how John Gunther's editor at the Chicago Daily News demanded (in 1933) "more diversified" copy about Germany. Gunther's reporting, the editor said, "has been loaded with anti-Hitler copy for two weeks," adding that Gunther had to "write about something else besides the infringement of personal liberty." As I learned in journalism school, a reporter is not writing for the public but for their editor.
Its considerabIe virtues aside, I gave the book only 4 stars because I just wasn't interested in the journalists' messy personal lives, which are sometimes their least admirable qualities. To some degree, their personal lives were inseparable from their professional careers, so it makes sense for Professor Cohen to include that material, but I just didn't care that much about their affairs and marriages. This is totally a reflection of my own quirky interests, and I recognize that other readers and the critics think differently. "Last Call" has certainly and deservedly earned a lot of enthusiastic praise, so my view is definitely a minority opinion.
"Last Call" is absolutely a fascinating read, and I'm grateful for Professor Cohen's awesome scholarship that illuminates the work of gutsy journalists of another era, especially (for me), Dorothy Thompson.
One person found this helpful
Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2022
Fifty-plus years ago I took a course in the History of Journalism at Northwestern's Medill School. The professor, Richard Gray, presented lectures in the form of personal stories about the intrepid newsmen who uncovered the news and helped fashioned public opinion. While some of the story-telling was overdramatic, I remember the details of his lecutres to this day.
Professor Cohen has done us a simnilar service by telling true stories about the the practice of journalism, the perils of fame, and the correspondent's compulsion to reject the values of a "normal" life in favor of the pursuit of wild and domesticated "game."
Other reviewers have criticized the book because it doesn't offer a complete story of the rise of dictators and fascists. But, the subtitle announces that this book is about reporters and their work, not a comprehensive look at all the news they cover. And I'll bet no other book about the era includes details on how Knickerbocker got an interview with Joseph Stalin's mother.
As an amateur writer of history I know how long it takes to "nail down" a single fact for a book and so I'm startled that Professor Cohen kept a fulltime job while accumulating nearly 100 pages of footnotes to document the sources of her reporting. Brava!
This is an important book about human beings at the frontline of history. They all had flaws, they all had brilliance. Read the book. It is beautifully written.
19 people found this helpful