Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

Description

"Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original."―Joan Didion

Since its publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. Laid out in 316 sections as carefully measured as a grid of tract houses, Holy Land is by turns touching, eerie, funny, and encyclopedic in its handling of what was gained and lost when thousands of blue-collar families were thrown together in the suburbs of the 1950s. An intensely realized and wholly original memoir about the way in which a place can shape a life, Holy Land; is ultimately about the resonance of choices―how wide a street should be, what to name a park―and the hopes that are realized in the habits of everyday life. 20 illustrations and a new introduction for this paperback edition. 20 illustrationsWelcome to Lakewood, California, the world s largest suburb and the subject of an oddly mesmerizing account of its creation by D. J. Waldie. Waldie describes how bean fields were drawn up, sectioned off and divided up--leaving tracts for small houses of similar design. The author changes while the land around him does, in a story of how people make places and, more so, places make people.