Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

“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