Last Call at the Hotel Imperial

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. -The New Yorker [Ms. Cohen] takes their story to a new level with prodigious research and sparkling prose. The book is a model of its kind. -The Wall Street Journal Riveting . . . With the breezy scene-setting of a party reporter, the rigor of a scholar, and deep empathy for the humans behind these historic bylines, Cohen makes the correspondents come alive. -Air Mail News Ambitious . . . a distressing, immersive recounting of how denial, passivity and pacification aided the rise of authoritarian regimes. -New York Times Book Review The celebrated journalists of the Lost Generation were voracious, reckless, promiscuous, funny, and drunk, and they were also shrewd and deeply political. They explained the world to Americans, shaping their thoughts on fascism and empire, racism and sex. As intimate and gripping as a novel, this brilliant book vividly conveys what it felt like to live through the shocking crises of the thirties and forties as they were occurring, when nearly anything could happen next. -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 A whip-smart, propulsive book about the globe-trotting (and bed-hopping) journalists who brought foreign affairs alive. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is a triumph. -Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire A kaleidoscopic epic . . . a timely and often uncanny mirror for our present moment of national reckoning. -Deborah Baker, author of The Last Englishmen It is both bracing and oddly comforting to read Deborah Cohen's luminous account of a group of writers who faced their own challenging times with courage, wit, and portable typewriters. We have much to learn from this brilliant reclamation of their commitments and their lives. -Susan Pedersen, author of The Guardians Brilliantly conceived, beautifully written, this is a daring new history of the world between the wars. Cohen's revelatory book shows how, in the age of extremes, the lines blurred between the personal and the political, biography and history. The work of a truly original historian . . . unforgettable. -Adam Tooze, author of Crashed and Shutdown Scintillating . . . Reads like an Alan Furst novel, full of close calls and intrigue . . . [Cohen] 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. 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. . . . The resulting history is both unique and memorable. -Library Journal (starred review) An evocative portrait . . . 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)