Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

Viac o knihe

They were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed a war-ravaged world, sometimes on mules, sometimes in first-class sleeper cars. While empires collapsed and democracies faltered, they pursued deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, often enjoying late-night drinks. This extraordinary story follows John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, who secured exclusive interviews with figures like Hitler, Mussolini, Nehru, and Gandhi, shaping American perceptions of global events. Alongside these insights into power, they documented their own lives with frankness, engaging in discussions about love, war, sex, and death. Immersed in global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could not detach from the turmoil around them, breaking long-standing taboos in their storytelling. From their circle emerged the first modern account of illness in Gunther's memoir about his son's cancer, and Sheean's candid chronicle of Thompson's tumultuous marriage to Sinclair Lewis.