Holy Land
A Suburban Memoir
By D.J. Waldie
(St. Martin's Griffin, Paperback, 9780312168643, 192pp.)
Publication Date: August 1997
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback
Categories: Historical - U.S., Regional Subjects - West
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An exquisitely realized and wholly original memoir of growing up in blue-collar 1950s Lakewood, California, the quintessential post-world war II American suburb and the prototype for the countless tract developments that would follow. Lyrical, compassionate statement of the hard-won values of American suburban places.
D.J. Waldie was named one of the "100 coolest people in L.A." by Buzz magazine and was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1994. He lives in the house his parents bought in 1946 in Lakewood, California, where he is a city official.
"Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original." --Joan Didion
"Welcome to the first church of the suburbs. Let Holy Land be your bible." --The Los Angeles Times
"An astonishing book, unsentimental, baleful, yet oddly affecting. I have never read anything quite like it." --Witold Rybczynski
"With Holy Land, poet-historian D.J. Waldie has produced a brilliant period piece about suburban L.A., an American classic which shines with the poignancy, loss, and optimism produced by ages of discovery." --Peter Theroux
"I have read hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more, memoirs of California. Holy Land ranks with the best of them. With spare fact, Waldie has managed to present the rise of suburban Southern California in its full complexity." --Dr. Kevin Starr, author of Americans and the California Dream
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