What if you could live the luxury hotel experience at home, every day? Hotels to Home answers that question by creating a new lifestyle template that bridges the gap between your fondest hotel memories and everyday living. Imagine stepping into your entryway with the eager anticipation as when entering your favorite hotel lobby, defining your family’s hotel brand as a lifestyle strategy, finely orchestrating room service for your household, or celebrating the end of each day with personalized turndown service. Taking what might have once been considered ordinary homelife and making your address a highly coveted destination. Less memoir, more guidebook. Peek into the author’s travel essays and enjoy prompts to excavate your own vacation preferences that reveal a holiday lifestyle at home. Welcome to the Hotels to Home lifestyle!
From the acclaimed Rick Moody, a darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews. Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe -- they tell his life story. The puzzle of Reginald's life comes together through reviews that comment upon his motivational speaking career, the dissolution of his marriage, the separation from his beloved daughter, and his devotion to an amour known only as "K." But when Reginald disappears, we are left with the fragments of a life -- or at least the life he has carefully constructed -- which writer Rick Moody must make sense of. An inventive blurring of the lines between the real and the fabricated, Hotels of North America demonstrates Moody's masterly ability to push the bounds of the novel.
From the palace hotels of the elite to cheap lodging houses, residential hotels have been an element of American urban life for nearly two hundred years. Since 1870, however, they have been the target of an official war led by people whose concept of home does not include the hotel. Do these residences constitute an essential housing resource, or are they, as charged, a public nuisance? Living Downtown, the first comprehensive social and cultural history of life in American residential hotels, adds a much-needed historical perspective to this ongoing debate. Creatively combining evidence from biographies, buildings and urban neighborhoods, workplace records, and housing policies, Paul Groth provides a definitive analysis of life in four price-differentiated types of downtown residence. He demonstrates that these hotels have played a valuable socioeconomic role as home to both long-term residents and temporary laborers. Also, the convenience of hotels has made them the residence of choice for a surprising number of Americans, from hobo author Boxcar Bertha to Calvin Coolidge. Groth examines the social and cultural objections to hotel households and the increasing efforts to eliminate them, which have led to the seemingly irrational destruction of millions of such housing units since 1960. He argues convincingly that these efforts have been a leading contributor to urban homelessness. This highly original and timely work aims to expand the concept of the American home and to recast accepted notions about the relationships among urban life, architecture, and the public management of residential environments.
“Charming and imaginative, and full of endearing characters who excel at kindness as only animals can. With stories that highlight the power of friendship, Heartwood Hotel is sure to leave readers eager to visit again.” —Ashley Spires, author and illustrator of The Most Magnificent Thing “If there’s one thing Vancouver author Kallie George knows, it’s how to create a tale full of whimsy.” —Quill & Quire Downton Abbey meets The Tale of Peter Rabbit in this heartwarming chapter book about a mouse discovering where she belongs. When Mona the mouse stumbles across the wondrous world of the Heartwood Hotel in the middle of a storm, she desperately hopes the staff will let her stay. As it turns out, Mona is precisely the maid they need at the grandest hotel in Fernwood Forest, where animals come from far and wide for safety, luxury and comfort. But it’s not all acorn soufflé and soft, moss-lined beds. Danger lurks nearby, and as it approaches, Mona has to use all her wits to protect the place she’s come to love. Because this hotel is more than a warm shelter for the night. It might also be a home. This delightfully enticing story of friendship, courage and community, sweetly illustrated by Stephanie Graegin, kicks off a new chapter-book series by the author of the Magical Animal Adoption Agency books.
The Negro Motorist Green Book was a groundbreaking guide that provided African American travelers with crucial information on safe places to stay, eat, and visit during the era of segregation in the United States. This essential resource, originally published from 1936 to 1966, offered a lifeline to black motorists navigating a deeply divided nation, helping them avoid the dangers and indignities of racism on the road. More than just a travel guide, The Negro Motorist Green Book stands as a powerful symbol of resilience and resistance in the face of oppression, offering a poignant glimpse into the challenges and triumphs of the African American experience in the 20th century.
A vibrantly illustrated exploration of the creative, inclusive, and inspiring movement happening in today’s Southern interior design The American South is a place steeped in history and tradition. We think of sweet tea, thick drawls, and even thicker summer air. It is also a place with a fraught history, complicated social norms, and dated perspectives. Yet among the makers and artists of the South, there is a powerful movement afoot. Alyssa Rosenheck shines a much-needed spotlight on a burgeoning community of people who are taking what’s beloved, inherent, and honored in the South and making it their own. The New Southern Style tours more than 30 homes and includes interviews with the designers, artists, and creative entrepreneurs who are reinventing Southern design and culture. This beautifully illustrated book is sure to inspire the home and soul.
This brief comparatively reviews the security and safety features of hotels and home sharing services. It reviews crime data, laws, and applicable theories – such as defensible space, rational choice, and routine activity theories - to determine how responsibility for crime control and accident prevention in these industries is allotted.This analysis identifies key policy questions about the role of the home sharing hosts and guests in ensuring their own safety and security, which will be of interest to policy makers, researchers and practitioners in criminal justice and law enforcement, as well as those involved in the home sharing and hotel industries.
The definitive word on tacos from native Angeleno Wes Avila, who draws on his Mexican heritage as well as his time in the kitchens of some of the world's best restaurants to create taco perfection. In a town overrun with taco trucks, Wes Avila's Guerrilla Tacos has managed to win almost every accolade there is, from being crowned Best Taco Truck by LA Weekly to being called one of the best things to eat in Los Angeles by legendary food critic Jonathan Gold. Avila's approach stands out in a crowded field because it's unique: the 50 base recipes in this book are grounded in authenticity but never tied down to tradition. Wes uses ingredients like kurobata sausage and sea urchin, but his bestselling taco is made from the humble sweet potato. From basic building blocks to how to balance flavor and texture, with comic-inspired illustrations and stories throughout, Guerrilla Tacos is the final word on tacos from the streets of L.A.
In the tradition of Kitchen Confidential and Waiter Rant, a rollicking, eye-opening, fantastically indiscreet memoir of a life spent (and misspent) in the hotel industry. “Highly amusing."—New York Times Jacob Tomsky never intended to go into the hotel business. As a new college graduate, armed only with a philosophy degree and a singular lack of career direction, he became a valet parker for a large luxury hotel in New Orleans. Yet, rising fast through the ranks, he ended up working in “hospitality” for more than a decade, doing everything from supervising the housekeeping department to manning the front desk at an upscale Manhattan hotel. He’s checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room-service meals, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late checkout, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your minibar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. In Heads in Beds he pulls back the curtain to expose the crazy and compelling reality of a multi-billion-dollar industry we think we know. Heads in Beds is a funny, authentic, and irreverent chronicle of the highs and lows of hotel life, told by a keenly observant insider who’s seen it all. Prepare to be amused, shocked, and amazed as he spills the unwritten code of the bellhops, the antics that go on in the valet parking garage, the housekeeping department’s dirty little secrets—not to mention the shameless activities of the guests, who are rarely on their best behavior. Prepare to be moved, too, by his candor about what it’s like to toil in a highly demanding service industry at the luxury level, where people expect to get what they pay for (and often a whole lot more). Employees are poorly paid and frequently abused by coworkers and guests alike, and maintaining a semblance of sanity is a daily challenge. Along his journey Tomsky also reveals the secrets of the industry, offering easy ways to get what you need from your hotel without any hassle. This book (and a timely proffered twenty-dollar bill) will help you score late checkouts and upgrades, get free stuff galore, and make that pay-per-view charge magically disappear. Thanks to him you’ll know how to get the very best service from any business that makes its money from putting heads in beds. Or, at the very least, you will keep the bellmen from taking your luggage into the camera-free back office and bashing it against the wall repeatedly.
