In the giant mirror that filled its far wall, you could see who was coming and going: former Ottoman potentates and Montenegrin bandits, schemers, gunrunners, the Outs conniving against the status quo. Reporters took the low-ceilinged, paneled room facing the street. A smattering of turpentine and flax brokers colonized the front. They wrote what they thought about the events in Europe and Asia and, just as importantly, what they felt.” A cast of supporting characters - including India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru the British writers Harold Nicolson and Rebecca West Stalin’s mother and an indignant Joseph Goebbels - makes for a capacious book with the kind of material that practically cries out to be made into a limited series.Ĭohen’s lucid prose makes for easy and engaging reading - one longs to lounge in the book’s eponymous hotel in Vienna:Īt the café on the ground floor, the jewel merchants shared the back room with the gamblers and the musicians. Knickerbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, are bound together by “a common cause: the conviction that the ideal of journalistic objectivity revered by their elders and editors had to yield to a different, more personal sort of reporting. The correspondents, John and Frances Gunther, H. “THEY BEGAN THE decade by reporting the story, but by 1939, they were the story,” writes Deborah Cohen, describing the five American foreign correspondents at the heart of her new book, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War.

Last call at hotel imperial