Hotel Life
The Story of a Place Where Anything Can Happen
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
What is a hotel? As Caroline Field Levander and Matthew Pratt Guterl show us in this thought-provoking book, even though hotels are everywhere around us, we rarely consider their essential role in our modern existence and how they help frame our sense of who and what we are. They are, in fact, as centrally important as other powerful places like prisons, hospitals, or universities. More than simply structures made of steel, concrete, and glass, hotels are social and political institutions that we invest with overlapping and contradictory meaning. These alluring places uniquely capture the realities of our world, where the lines between public and private, labor and leisure, fortune and failure, desire and despair are regularly blurred. Guiding readers through the story of hotels as places of troublesome possibility, as mazelike physical buildings, as inspirational touchstones for art and literature, and as unsettling, even disturbing, backdrops for the drama of everyday life, Levander and Guterl ensure that we will never think about this seemingly ordinary place in the same way again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Taking a strictly academic approach that will deter most casual readers, this book examines the cultural, social, and political implications of one of society's most ubiquitous establishments. Indeed, hotels have served the desires of the wealthy and needs of the downtrodden for centuries. Levander and Guterl, respectively a professor of English at Rice University and professor of Africana and American studies at Brown University, divide their analysis into four core concepts space, time, scale, and affect and describe (in unnecessarily complicated terms) the hotel as public space, private getaway, and "purveyor of both fortune and failure." Other chapters focus on hotel-related murders, suicides, and sexual escapades, as well as low-end SROs (single-room occupancy hotels) and "the worst hotels on earth." Pop culture references abound, from Charlie Sheen's arrest at New York's Plaza Hotel to Whitney Houston's death in Room 434 of the Beverly Hilton. These passages effectively illustrate the darker side of "hotel life," but also remind readers that it can be depicted far more colorfully than has been done here.
