ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of God's Hotel

How long does it take to read God's Hotel?

Victoria Sweet

God's Hotel by Victoria Sweet takes about 7 hours 22 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours 22 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2012. 402 pages, about 110,550 words.

15 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 12 hours 17 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours 22 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 36 minutes

The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

"San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hotel-Dieu (God's Hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves--"anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care-ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years.Laguna Honda, lower tech but human paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God's Hotel tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern "health care facility," revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for body and soul"-- "Choosing service in the last remaining almshouse in America, and tracing our understanding of medicine back to its medieval roots, a physician uncovers lost lessons in the care of body and soul"--

Subjects: Physicians, Hospital care, MEDICAL / Essays, Anecdotes, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Medical, Biography

Books like this

Popular books of similar length