From Publishers Weekly
In this lucid and creative work, Sandoval-Strausz, an assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico, situates the rise of hotels within the history of the triumph of capitalism and of an increasingly mobile society. Hotels, he says, facilitated mobility and the integration of frontier lands into larger networks of capital and commerce. Hotels were also part of the gradual process that dissociated people from particular places. If hotels solved some social problems, Sandoval-Strausz shows, they created others: guardians of domesticity, for example, worried about urban dwellers who chose to live full-time in hotels. In exploring the social and political meaning of hotels, the author pursues countless avenues, from menus to morals (Hotels were magnets for prostitution and other forms of illicit sex). There's a bit of labor history thrown in, too, since, in order to make good on the promise to be patrons' home away from home, hotels employed a huge number of workers, from cooks and launderers to janitors, Sandoval-Strausz also traces hotels' exclusion of Jews and blacks—the book ends with the 1964 Supreme Court case that desegregated public accommodations. From start to finish, this is a fascinating study. 93 color, 58 b&w illus.
(Nov.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Hotel is a marvelous piece of work. It is lucid, original, beautifully written, wonderfully illustrated, and historiographically and theoretically sophisticated. It is brimming with fresh insights."—Wendy Gamber, Indiana University
(Wendy Gamber )
“This is an essential history of one of the nation’s most significant building types. A.K. Sandoval-Strausz deftly sets hotels at the center of the nation’s social history, urban development, and political consciousness.”—Dell Upton, author of Architecture in the United States
(Dell Upton )
"In Hotel: An American History, A.K. Sandoval-Strausz presents a highly creative history of the nineteenth-century first-class hotel, and develops important and stimulating interpretations of what hotels have meant to American business, culture, and racial politics."--Paul Groth, University of California, Berkeley
(Paul Groth )
“Once upon a time, hotels were simply way-stations where weary travelers could stop to rest along a journey that could take many days. But over the centuries, hotels evolved into the symbols of American capitalism and of urban life. The biggest and best of them provided glamour, sophistication, elegance, and excitement, and A. K. Sandoval-Strausz has now given them the recognition they deserve. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, Hotel will reward both the specialist and the general reader.”—Kenneth T. Jackson, Columbia University
(Kenneth T. Jackson )
"A new exhaustive history on where travelers hang their hats."—New York Post
(
New York Post )
"All . . . interested in the interrelationships among architecture, institutions, politics, economics, and culture [should] read this excellent study. That it fills the longstanding need for an up-to-date scholarly history of the hotel is only the most obvious of its considerable achievements."—Catherine Cocks, American Historical Review
(Catherine Cocks
American Historical Review )
“Professor Sandoval-Strausz’s cultural history of the hotel in America is like getting the best suite in the house: fabulous views, elegant details, and fine finishes. Writing as an historian, he integrates architecture, urban geography, and social history to illuminate the influence of hotel development and tourism on our country’s development.”—Richard Penner, Cornell School of Hotel Administration
(Richard Penner )
"The authority and imagination with [which Sandoval-Strausz] explores an impressive range of subjects, orchestrating them within a taut, holistic framework render Hotel an exceptional study by any standard."--Richard Longstreth, Journal of Social History
(Richard Longstreth
Journal of Social History )
