‘Effervescent’ New Yorker Best Books Of 2022 So Far ‘Bursts
with colour and incident’ FT Best Books of Summer Read this
prize-winning historian’s “immersive” ( New York Times)
account of the famous writers who, in the run-up to World War II,
took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism 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 splendour of a
first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling
democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international
financiers and Balkan gunrunners, 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: a close-knit band of wildly famous
American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on
dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism. In those
tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler,
Franco and Mussolini who sought to persuade them of fascism’s
inevitable triumph. Nehru and Gandhi also courted them, seeking
American allies against British imperialism. Churchill saw them as
his best shot at convincing a reluctant America to join the war
against Hitler. They committed themselves to the cause of freedom:
fiercely and with all its hazards. They argued about love, war,
sex, death and everything in between, and they wrote it all down.
The fault lines that ran through a crumbling world, they would
find, ran through their own marriages and friendships, too. Told
with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory
book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century
felt to live through up close.
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