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By Lesley M. M. Blume

• Published March 16, 2022 Updated March 18, 2022

LAST CALL AT THE HOTEL IMPERIAL The Reporters Who Took On a World at War By Deborah Cohen

For Ernest Hemingway, successful writing required creating something that no one else had created before — but it also hinged on two elements beyond one’s control: luck and timing. By this standard, the historian Deborah Cohen has scored big-time: her book “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial” is bringing out disturbingly prescient material at exactly the right moment.

Cohen’s ambitious ensemble biography documents the intertwined careers, friendships and sex lives of four hugely influential correspondents and commentators primarily covering Europe in the lead-up to World War II. Like Hemingway (who occasionally barges in), the book’s four stars — John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, James Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean and Dorothy Thompson — hailed from provincial America, but took Europe by storm after World War I.

It would be hard to overstate the collective power and visibility of these reporters in their heyday. When Gunther died, The New York Times wrote that he had “traveled more miles, crossed more borders, interviewed more statesmen, wrote more books and sold more copies than any other single journalist of his time.” Thompson’s “On the Record” column appeared in 170 newspapers; her late-1930s NBC radio broadcasts reached millions of listeners. She didn’t just interview Churchill; she was his weekend guest. Cohen recounts an amusing anecdote in which Thompson and her then-husband, Sinclair Lewis, were in bed one morning when President Franklin Roosevelt telephoned. Lewis “handed the phone over to her, the cord stretched tight across his throat, and there he lay for a half-hour … pinned to the bed while his wife … gabbed on with the president, making the country’s foreign policy.”

Yet like many zeitgeist-encapsulating power brokers of the past, the four have been unjustly forgotten today. Later generations of journalists owed a debt to these pioneers, who helped invent modern conflict reporting. “This was before journalism became institutionalized,” Gunther later said. “We correspondents were strictly on our own. We avoided official handouts. We were scavengers, buzzards, out to get the news, no matter whose wings got clipped.”

Wing-clipping was a polite term for some of the reporting he and his colleagues did, especially once the Third Reich picked up steam. As fascism swept across the continent, these reporters were unsparing in their coverage of what Nazism was unleashing. Hitler personally banned Sheean’s writings. Gunther’s portrayal of the Führer in his best seller “Inside Europe” earned him a place of honor on the Gestapo’s hit list.

Not that these correspondents didn’t make missteps. Knickerbocker was accused of being a Mussolini apologist in the early days of the Fascist leader’s regime. In 1932, Thompson predicted that “Little Man” Hitler’s bid for power would fizzle out. Just imagine, she wrote, “a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights.” The very idea was farcical. Never mind that Hitler had told her — on the record — that he intended to “get into power legally” and “abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward,” then “found an authority state” that demanded total obedience from its subjects. (Cohen oddly leaves this crucial interview excerpt out of “Hotel Imperial,” but it’s been documented elsewhere.) Yet Thompson was relentless in her subsequent coverage of the Reich’s brutality and the global threat that Hitler posed. In 1934, she earned the distinction of being the first foreign correspondent banished from Nazi Germany. She proudly framed her expulsion order.

Despite their reach and determination, however, the correspondents despaired over the limited impact of their reporting. Isolationists in America would not be budged; the war machine gathered strength abroad; the appetite for authoritarianism continued to grow. Cohen describes Gunther’s incredulousness that the same people who had demanded liberty and equality were now “clamoring for fascism.” Why, Gunther asked, “would people who distrust authority choose to subsume themselves in a strongman?” Meanwhile, Thompson warned that fascism could just as easily manifest in America, writing: “Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.”

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. (Dumb it down, the Moscow-based correspondent Walter Duranty advised Gunther: “You’re writing for the sort of people who think Prague is a ham.”) 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. Cohen’s recounting of Gunther’s on-site reporting during the 1934 coup attempt by Austrian Nazis — culminating in the siege and occupation of the Chancellery, and the gruesome murder of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss — is un-put-downable. Equally riveting: Cohen’s recounting of the Night of Long Knives, and Thompson’s daring trip to Germany to report on the massacre’s aftermath, despite her place on Goebbels’s blacklist.

Grim reminders abound about the cyclical nature of history: how racial and economic resentments can lead to monstrous movements; and, above all, how human beings remain impervious to even the starkest of warnings. On a more cynical note, “Hotel Imperial” also reminds readers that the news industry was, and remains, a business. In the eyes of Thompson and crew, dictators needed to be toppled — but they also made great copy. A former journalist himself, Mussolini gave out interviews like candy (Knickerbocker alone scored four audiences with Il Duce), but a rare Hitler “get” caused a surge of envy within the correspondent community, sold thousands of newspapers and gave journalists material for best-selling books. “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial” depicts several queasy instances of dictator-cultivation. “You’re a “journalistic whore,” Gunther told Knickerbocker at one point — even though he too coveted Mussolini scoops.

World War II is almost an afterthought in Cohen’s book, largely because the careers of her four subjects began to stall once hostilities began. Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean and Thompson had been reporter-prophets of the prewar era, but coverage of the war itself was dominated by a new wave of correspondents like Edward Murrow, Ernie Pyle and Eric Sevareid. From their emeritus perches, Gunther and his colleagues could now say “I told you so,” but were forced to wonder what their years of warnings had yielded: After all, tens of millions of people still died in what became the deadliest conflict of all time. Cohen describes a heartbreaking scene in which Gunther and Sheean, in 1945, see members of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing crews celebrating at the Stork Club.

“‘Do you think they realize they’ve killed more humans than anyone else in history?’ John asked Jimmy.

“‘No chance of it,’ Jimmy answered. ‘Look at their faces.’”

Lesley M. M. Blume is a journalist and historian, and the author of “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World.”

LAST CALL AT THE HOTEL IMPERIAL The Reporters Who Took On a World at War By Deborah Cohen Illustrated. 561 pp. Random House. $30.

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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

Deborah Cohen. Random House, 2022. 592 pages. $30.00.

Winner of the 2023 Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Award

By Allen D. Boyer

“Notes scribbled in little spiral-bound books as they were interviewing Hitler, Gandhi, and Mussolini. Letters to and from lovers . . . . Diaries of rigorous, chiding introspection, full of desires and jealousies and gossip. Volumes of dream journals kept at the behest of a psychoanalyst . . . . Thousands and thousands of candy-hued slips of paper, bound together with rusty paper clips or stuffed into envelopes. On one scrap, a confession of infidelity, on another, a rumor about Stalin’s family life.”

From the archives of the great age of American journalism, with the quick cuts of a newsreel, backed by the clacking of typewriters and the hum of a shortwave radio, Deborah Cohen (ΦBK, Radcliffe College) offers a marvelous group portrait of the American foreign correspondents who reported on Europe in the years between the wars.

Dorothy Thompson numbered among her husbands Sinclair Lewis. A cross between “the Goddess Minerva and the engines of the S.S. Normandie” (as John Gunther put it), she was the first American reporter expelled from Nazi Germany—after Hitler came to power, for a long-past interview in which she had called him “an agitator of genius,” yet soft-mannered, “almost feminine.”

Jimmy Sheean, the University of Chicago man at the upstart New York Daily News , once counted up the places he could never go back to: Paris, Prague, Shanghai, Singapore, Lake Maggiore, Barcelona, Munich, Salzburg, Rangoon, Athens.

Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker could swear in every major language but always carried a Bible (back home in Texas, his father was a Methodist preacher). Knick wrote for the Hearst syndicate, when he wasn’t drinking; he won a Pulitzer for reporting on a 10,000-mile journey across Stalin’s Russia.

Emily “Mickey” Hahn went to earth in Shanghai, smoking opium and filing stories for The New Yorker . John Gunther and Frances Gunther juggled a marriage burdened with lovers and family losses. Young Bill Shirer trailed John and chased Frances.

“The leading lights of international reporting didn’t come from the boarding schools of the East Coast or the Ivy League,” Cohen writes. “Rather, they hailed from America’s Babbitt towns and the rich agricultural plains of the Midwest, the provincial heartland. The revolutionary changes in technology and transport that brought Model Ts to rural Americans also delivered mail-order books . . . as well as the big-city papers that traveled hundreds of miles through the night to be delivered before breakfast.”

In the ‘20s and ‘30s, American correspondents dominated world news. With America’s best young novelists working from Paris and its businesses tied to a new global economy (the bank failures of the Depression started with the collapse of Austria’s Credit Anstalt), the nation’s newspapers sent out journalists to cover the world, paying for assignments that European papers could not afford. “The American type of wandering or perambulatory foreign correspondent,” Harold Nicolson commented, was a Yankee innovation that the British should imitate.

In Vienna, at the Hotel Imperial, the foreign correspondents took over the café.

“There was an aroma of conspiracy about the place; it was said that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been plotted there. A white-gloved waiter oversaw the wooden cupboard in which 16 Austrian newspapers and 60-odd foreign papers hung on rattan racks: Yugoslav and Bulgarian broadsheets; newspapers from Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark and a Cairo paper published in English.”

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial has something about it of The Front Page , in which Chicago newsmen compete and collude to land a scoop and do justice (and playwright Ben Hecht floats across this book in a recurring cameo part). But peering below the surface, Cohen argues that the correspondents’ careers reflected a conscious blurring of the personal and the political. 

Interviewing dictators was a way to write about the political conflagrations that were kindling across Europe. Like others of their age, the correspondents found in psychoanalysis a theory to connect private experience with public events. John Gunther tried to win an interview with Sigmund Freud by offering new details of Hitler’s family background, and Frances Gunther was even more strident. “Tear the veil off the dictators, she urged her husband.” Write “that Poland’s Marshal Pilsudski was subject to psychopathic temper tantrums and Turkey’s Kemal Atatürk was a mother-fixated drunk.”

The stories the correspondents filed were not the self-dramatizing narratives of 1960s New Journalism, or the identity-grounded nonfiction of the present day. Rather, “they wrote what they thought about the events in Europe and Asia and, just as importantly, what they felt. The truth, as Jimmy [Sheean] put it, mattered more than a litany of facts. For Americans, it required a new way of imagining oneself in the world.”

“Even when they were far part, even after they fell out, they kept right on talking and arguing, long after the actual conversations had ended.” That is Cohen’s epitaph on her characters. Keen-eyed, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, ambitious, persistent—perhaps the crowd at the Hotel Imperial was America’s answer to Bloomsbury. It’s a great story, and Cohen tells it well.

Allen D. Boyer (ΦBK, Vanderbilt University) is a writer and reviewer, a native of Mississippi working on Staten Island.  Vanderbilt University is home to the Alpha of Tennessee chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

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In the mid-1930s, American star reporter John Gunther stopped off at a tumbledown village in Lower Austria during a trip that took him from his Vienna office to Prague. Local peasants told him of tangled family histories and a sickly boy protected by a servant-girl mother against his drunken father as a future “great man”. No one before had gone to Spital to find Adolf Hitler’s relatives. His scoop fitted the method perfected by Gunther and the fellow-journalists whose adventures fill Deborah Cohen’s swarming and engrossing book. In the age of world-shaking dictators, private lives mattered again in global politics as “individual personality had jolted history into a new gear”.

Between the wars, Cohen’s quartet of celebrity newshounds bestrode the globe like media colossi with cabin trunks and expense accounts, “buzzards in every foreign office”, Gunther wrote, “and kings on every wagon-lit.” From a Europe in turmoil they wired quick-fire dispatches, or mailed panoramic think-pieces, back to booming big-city papers that served a mass American public eager for trustworthy witnesses, even prophets, who “saw the world as a whole”.

By 1939, they “were the story”. Dorothy Thompson, who earned the equivalent today of $1.8mn per year, inspired Katharine Hepburn’s character in Woman of the Year and advised President Roosevelt. A memoir by Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean prompted Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Foreign Correspondent . As for H R Knickerbocker (“Knick”), his bedazzlement by Mussolini (“Benevolent, agreeable, polite, intelligent”) didn’t stop him from finding a “talented, dangerous demagogue” in Hitler before the Nazi takeover. If “personal pathologies became the stuff of geopolitics”, then in-depth interviews might unlock the true meaning of events. From Trotsky to Gandhi, this gang nailed the exclusives.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial 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. Friendship and rivalry bound these high-achieving children of the Great War’s aftermath into a band of fractious professional siblings. They turned America’s newfound entitlement into the platform for strong-voiced, high-impact reporting that tried “to integrate an individual life with the world’s struggles”.

Truth mattered to them; political neutrality, not so much. After all, “facts carried viewpoints”. From India’s freedom movement to unrest in Palestine, they also raised their eyes beyond the “European slugfest” to glimpse a coming world. Frances Fineman, Gunther’s wife and Cohen’s fifth principal player, swapped reporting the news for shaping it: she was an intimate friend of Jawaharlal Nehru, a leading Zionist activist, and a “charismatic mainstay of two nationalistic organisations”.

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: into literary London, for instance, where novelist Rebecca West served as part-muse, part-aunt to Gunther, while the bisexual Jimmy Sheean befriended the top-drawer bohemians Duncan Grant and Eddy Sackville-West. Psychoanalysis, especially with their guru Wilhelm Stekel, enriched the quest for a “democratic language of plain speaking about taboo subjects” — tyrannical power, bigotry or sexuality.

Good reporting, though, quickened their blood. When Sheean, the adoptive Bloomsbury aesthete, exposed a racist pogrom in Tennessee in 1946, he recorded that “For once I have done something useful by writing.”

Their sensational bestsellers — Gunther’s above all — have dropped into oblivion. A younger, cold war generation revived “the ideal of objectivity”. The New Yorker scoffed at Gunther’s work, “a portrait of cornfed, globe-trotting American hubris”.

One book, though, stays in print: Death Be Not Proud , the trailblazing memoir of grief that Gunther (with Fineman) wrote after the death of their son Johnny from a brain tumour, aged 17. “You see, your story was mine,” confided one of countless letters. He had scoured the world for scoops. The one that would endure brewed, in agony, at home.

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War by Deborah Cohen, William Collins £25, 592 pages

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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

by Deborah Cohen

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Published Mar 2022 592 pages Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion Publication Information

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Book summary.

A prize-winning historian's revelatory account of 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.

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 splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and 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. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther's Death Be Not Proud —a memoir about his son's death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean's Dorothy and Red , about Thompson's fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.

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Reader reviews.

"Northwestern University historian 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...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." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) "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." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "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...[T]he resulting history is both unique and memorable." - Library Journal (starred review) "The celebrated journalists of the lost generation were voracious, reckless, promiscuous, funny, and drunk, and they were also shrewd and deeply political. They raced toward disaster, interviewing the villainous and those they hoped would be heroes." - Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning "In this sterling book, Deborah Cohen follows a remarkable group of now mostly forgotten reporters as they try to make sense of a world turned upside down. The result is a shrewd and vivid work of history, one that combines deep research with lustrous narrative verve." - Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Embers of War and JFK "A fresh, fast-paced history of the twentieth-century's most defining events through the eyes of the foreign correspondents who dashed off to cover them...a riveting narrative that unites public and private affairs with rare fluency and power." - Maya Jasanoff, author of The Dawn Watch

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Author Information

Deborah cohen.

Deborah Cohen is the author of The War Come Home , Household Gods , and Family Secrets . She is also the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University, focusing on modern Europe.

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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War

A prize-winning historian’s revelatory account of a close-knit band of American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on the world’s dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism

In the aftermath of World War I, as fledgling democracies emerged from the ruins of defeated empires and strongmen grabbed power across Europe, millions of Americans, desperate to wall themselves off from the chaos, adopted an “America First” stance. But a group of hard-hitting foreign correspondents envisioned a different role for the United States in the world: They warned their readers that tyranny abroad posed a threat even to America, and urged their fellow citizens to see their own fate as tied to global struggles.  As young reporters covering revolutions and coup attempts in the 1920s, John Gunther, H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson became friends—and sometimes rivals. By the 1930s, they were interviewing Mussolini, Gandhi, Nehru, and Hitler; sharing cigars with Churchill; and chatting with FDR. They started their careers by reporting the story, but by the outbreak of World War II, they  were  the story, garnering audiences in the millions. Breaking with the objectivity that was then the mainstay of American reporting, they devised a new kind of journalism, both intimate and subjective. Their work raised urgent questions:  When should reporters take sides? Was it possible to cover would-be authoritarians without boosting their fame? But the fault lines that ran through crumbling nations caused rifts in their own lives as well, threatening marriages, friendships, and careers. To tell those stories, they pioneered a new sort of memoir—like Gunther’s best-selling  Death Be Not Proud  (1949)—that spoke openly about loss, pain, and love. Together, they brought the most private aspects of their lives into public view, and scrutiny. Drawing on rich troves of archival material,  Last Call at the Hotel Imperial  examines these astonishing reporters’ legacy and captures history in the making.

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LAST CALL AT THE HOTEL IMPERIAL

The reporters who took on a world at war.

by Deborah Cohen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2022

An exceptional book of cultural history that makes one long for the days of teletype, booze, spies, and scoops.

A scintillating group biography of once-famed journalists who were alternately friends, allies, lovers, and rivals.

Of the central ring of reporters Cohen profiles in this excellent ensemble study, only John Gunther is well remembered, mostly for his bestselling 1949 book, Death Be Not Proud . Some second-tier members are better known: William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), and Rebecca West, author of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). Yet everyone who passes under Cohen’s gaze is fascinating: H.R. Knickerbocker, known as Knick, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Stalin’s Russia; Jimmy Sheean, who won the first National Book Award for biography, in 1935; Dorothy Thompson, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau, in Berlin; and Gunther’s wife, Frances, an intimate of Jawaharlal Nehru’s with a lively command of both the English language and world politics. All produced extraordinary reportage that helped American readers understand the forces leading up to World War II, undertaking considerable risks. As Sheean wrote of Thompson, she excelled because “she could always step over the corpses and go on, steadily, resolutely, right to the end, with her head held very high indeed,” while Knick spent a terrifying couple of days sure that he would be executed by “Franco’s goons.” Cohen’s narrative reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue—e.g., Gunther had an affair with a Danish journalist who was a guest of Hitler’s at the 1936 Olympics, slept with John F. Kennedy, and was suspected of being a spy but really was just “an equal opportunity enchantress.” The reporters’ prescience was extraordinary, as when Sheean predicted that Gandhi would be killed by another Hindu. Cohen, a professor of humanities at Northwestern, convincingly argues, too, that journalism was the true literature of the interwar period, shaped by outsiders from small towns who wanted to better understand the world.

Pub Date: March 15, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-525-51119-9

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | WORLD | GENERAL NONFICTION

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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

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BOOK REVIEW

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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by Robert Greene

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Professor Deborah Cohen’s Book “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial” follows four influential journalists who sounded the alarm on WWII

Posted By: Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences March 23, 2022

Historian Deborah Cohen’s new book, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial , explores the lives of four journalists who reported from Europe and Asia during the lead-up to World War II. Cohen is the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University.

The story follows John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, James Vincent “Jimmy” Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, some of the most influential correspondents of the 20th century, as they charted two of the biggest stories of their time: the rise of fascism and the anti-colonial struggle against European empires. These individual reporters inspired related films including Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and Woman of the Year , starring Katharine Hepburn.

“At the start of the Second World War, Knickerbocker said this war is going to last six years. He pretty much predicted how the war was going to go. Part of what made them really good reporters was that they did have some uncanny powers of perception,” explained Cohen in an interview with On the Media .

The on-site reporting and interviews that resulted from their work served as important foundations for how we understand the 1920s and 1930s today. They were at the frontlines of the conflicts and had the first crack at interpreting the new phenomenon of modern dictatorship. They worked in the thick of dramatic and often violent events when the situations were confusing.

According to the book description:

Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between. Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud—a memoir about his son’s death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean’s Dorothy and Red, about Thompson’s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.

Cohen’s book has already been well-received, with positive reviews from The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Publishers’ Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal, and BookPage.

According to Lesley M. M. Blume from The New York Times, ‘Last Call’ provides “Grim reminders abound about the cyclical nature of history: how racial and economic resentments can lead to monstrous movements; and, above all, how human beings remain impervious to even the starkest of warnings. In the Wall Street Journal, the veteran newsman Ed Kosner praised Cohen’s prodigious research and sparkling prose,” calling the book “a model of its kind.”

As Krithika Varagur from The New Yorker writes, “ ‘Last Call’ is as effervescent, for more than four hundred pages, as its winsome and hyperactive characters, and it blends scholarly attention to ideas like psychoanalysis and Wilsonian liberal internationalism with novelistic renderings of these writers’ dizzying trajectories abroad.”

Cohen spoke with On the Media about her book and describes how the four foreign correspondents sounded the alarm on WWII and covered the biggest story of their time: the rise of the dictator. The interview is part of an episode titled, “We Were Warned.”

Listen to the interview:

Learn more about Professor Cohen’s new book.

• Read the review from The New York Times.
• Read the review from the New Yorker.
• Read the review from the Wall Street Journal .
• In The Atlantic essay, “The Book that Unleased American Grief,” Cohen described how one of the journalists, John Gunther, published a book Death Be Not Proud that chronicles his personal story of his son’s death to a brain tumor. She explains how this pivotal book  “defied a nation’s reluctance to describe personal loss.”

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Last Call at the Hotel Imperial Hardcover – July 6, 2022

Purchase options and add-ons

• Print length 560 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HarperCollins GB
• Publication date July 6, 2022
• Dimensions 6.26 x 1.97 x 9.45 inches
• ISBN-10 0008305862
• ISBN-13 978-0008305864
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins GB (July 6, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008305862
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008305864
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.98 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.26 x 1.97 x 9.45 inches
• Best Sellers Rank: #3,792,400 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Deborah cohen.

Deborah Cohen is the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is her fourth book. She's previously written about veterans (The War Come Home), the British love-affair with their possessions (Household Gods) and families and the transformation of social mores (Family Secrets).

She writes regularly for the Atlantic about subjects ranging from private lives to war photography to punk rock.

Her website is www.deborahcohen.com. She tweets from @deborahacohen.

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