Hotel: An American History

The Age

Saturday January 19, 2008

Bill Perrett

Hotel: An American History

A. K. Sandoval-Strausz

Yale University Press, $69.95

HOTELS, AS WE DISCOVER in this absorbing history of their American manifestation, have not always been the unremarkable features of travelling life that they are today. In Sandoval-Strausz's account, they embody a peculiarly American vision of "mobility, civil society, democracy", and are, in fact, an American invention. He compares the modern form, which evolved from the early days of the republic to its international and local forebears and cousins, inns and taverns, and traces the social and other forces which determined its greater size and opulence, and how modern hotels in their turn had significant influence on American history. Some of this influence has to do with who wasn't allowed in; there are cases of the exclusion of Jews, of black people. Woven throughout the book is Kant's humanitarian philosophy of hospitality, the necessity for the stranger to be accepted as a basis, eventually, for harmony in a pluralist society.

© 2008 The Age

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