Inside the Dream Palace by Sherill Tippins

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(Go here for the "look inside", price, customer reviews, etc.)
www.amazon.com/Inside-Dream-Palace-Legendary-Chelsea-ebook/dp/B00AUZS66A

This new release is on my Xmas list.  It may not be particularly educating but should be fun.  

Editorial Reviews

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2013: By the mid-nineteenth century, New York City was broke and divided, its coffers emptied by corrupt politicians and a vast chasm separating rich from the vast masses of the poor. Architect Philip Gengembre Hubert dreamed of reclaiming the city from the opportunists, reuniting its citizens within egalitarian communities of art and commerce, mingling all economic classes and vocations. And when his signature achievement, the Hotel Chelsea, opened in 1844, it immediately became a beacon for artists and inspiration, the spirits of creativity and collaboration literally blueprinted into its Victorian bricks and gables. With Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel, Sherill Tippins has written the definitive biography of the New York landmark. Tippins's Chelsea lives and breathes along with the mind-blowing roster of (often infamous) geniuses and eccentrics who haunt its chambers. Dylan Thomas died at the Chelsea, and Bob Dylan wrote Blonde on Blonde there. Warhol's Superstars dined in its halls, and Dee Dee Ramone detoxed in its junk-friendly confines. True to Hubert's vision, artists worked and trysted (and recombined) in wild pairings: Sam Shepard and Patti Smith; Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe; Jack Kerouac and Gore Vidal; Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin; Dylan and Edie Sedgwick; Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick; and, of course, Sid and Nancy. Inside the Dream Palace stands as a fitting monument to the hotel, its misfit denizens, and the art that it nurtured and inspired. --Jon Foro


“A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven...A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.”

—Kirkus


“A fascinating account of how a single building in New York City nurtured a community of freaks, dreamers, and outcasts whose rejection of the status quo helped to transform it.”

—Publishers Weekly


“Not only essential to the understanding of this crucial New York City—and therefore American—cultural landmark but as majestic and populous as the edifice itself, and completely entertaining.”

—Daniel Menaker, author of My Mistake: A Memoir


“New York, the greatest city in the world, has been a magnet for bohemians since it was founded, and the Chelsea Hotel has been Bohemia's home address for more than a century. Sherill Tippins captures the mad magic of this storied building. She has written a history, not just of a hotel, but of a dream: the dream that art can change the world. Her serene and nonjudgmental eye gives coherence and shape to a story that resists any conventional frame. The Chelsea has had its high points and low, supreme artistic achievements and drug-addled suicides, sometimes in the same room. Tippins is an indispensable urban historian; her book is a guide to the lofty aspirations and crashing disappointments of America's artistic avant-garde over the last century and a half. An unforgettable read.”

—Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, New York Public Theater


“The Chelsea Hotel is so much more than the place where Sid Vicious may or may not have killed his girlfriend; it was a social experiment turned incubator for creativity. It was home for the artists and weirdos that made this city so interesting—famous, infamous, and everything in between. Sherill Tippins has done a masterful job of condensing a history that could be volumes long, into a book that’s enthralling, enlightening and understandably wistful.”

—Judy McGuire, author of The Official Book of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll Lists


“An amazing history of not only the Chelsea Hotel but New York City itself. Thank you, Sherill Tippins, for this exciting story of how a building became a community and went on to be a legend. Inside the Dream Palace reads like the best fiction and never ever slows down from beginning to end.”

—Country Joe McDonald, activist and lead singer of Country Joe and the Fish


"An inspired investigation into the utopian spirit of the Chelsea Hotel" -- ELLE


"Cool hunters will appreciate Sherill Tippins’s Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York’s Legendary Chelsea Hotel, a social history of the city’s sanctuary for postwar artists and It girls." -- Vogue


"Zealous, big-picture researcher Tippins not only tells compelling tales, she also weaves them into a strikingly fresh, lucid, and socially anchored history of New York’s world-altering art movements. Though its future is uncertain, Tippins ensures that the Chelsea Hotel, dream palace and microcosm, will live on in our collective memory."-- Booklist, starred


If anyone else will be reading this one, we can start up our Bookl Club for the new year.

Hardcover: 480 pages

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (December 3, 2013)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0618726349

ISBN-13: 978-0618726349