These journalists have been chronicled before, but Ms. Cohen, a history professor at Northwestern University, takes their story to a new level with prodigious research and sparkling prose. The book is a model of its kind. The author follows her subjects not only to the world’s flash points but also into their bedrooms and onto their psychoanalysts’ couches, documenting their news-chasing heroism and romantic treachery. They emerge as paragons of journalistic nerve whose flaws energized their accomplishments..

... bringing out disturbingly prescient material at exactly the right moment.

In her luminous, extensively researched and beautifully written Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, historian Deborah Cohen brilliantly captures the complicated personal and professional lives of that period’s four most influential journalists, all close friends, who witnessed the rise of fascism and communism, the powder keg of the Middle East after the Balfour Declaration and much more.

... riveting.

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. Based on the voluminous published works of Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheehan, and Thompson—as well as their letters, notes, diaries, and journals and those of their families, friends, and colleagues—the resulting history is both unique and memorable.

... 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.

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.

... scintillating.