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Girdwood, Alaska: Edelweiss Publishing Company, Published 2020 [first printing January 2021]. Hardcover with dust jacket, 256 pp. plus color photo plates section; 24 cm; illustrated with black-and-white photographs throughout and a sixteen-page color photo section; includes a fold-out map of Alyeska Resort after page 192. Foreword by Bruce Bustamante.
In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. Green cloth-covered boards with black cloth quarter binding to spine and silver lettering on front and spine; mild bumping to edges and mild shelf wear. Binding is tight; pages are clean and unmarked. Pictorial dust jacket has a few small nicks and light creasing to edges with mild shelf wear. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. [From inside front jacket flap] This is a book filled with humor, hard work, sadness and being in the right place at the right time. Born in Berlin just weeks after Germany opened World War II by invading Poland, Chris von Imhof's mother moved him and his two brothers to their Bavarian resort home town, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which they had left so his race car driver father could open a Mercedes dealership in Germany's capital. By that time his father was drafted and fighting on the Eastern Front against Russia in the First Battle of Smolensk, where, as he predicted in a letter smuggled back to his mother by an injured German soldier, he would be killed in battle in short order. Now an orphan, he grew up in the town that hosted the 1936 Winter Olympics, on Hitler's orders. After taking a job running the Alyeska ski resort in 1967, he turned it into a world-class destination resort, and also had the opportunity to build and manage deluxe hotels in Hawaii. ISBN on copyright page 978-1-57833-772-9; ISBN on dust jacket 978-1-57833-803-0. Dedication; Foreword by Bruce Bustamante; sixty-four chapters covering von Imhof's Bavarian boyhood and the death of his father in Russia, hotel management training in Paris and Hollywood, his arrival in Alaska in 1964, the building of Alyeska Resort, hosting the world's ski elite, his work in Hawaii at the Hawaii Prince Hotel, family life, and reflections on his peaks and valleys; color photo section; fold-out map of Alyeska Resort; Acknowledgments.