His book will remind readers simultaneously of such disparate works as Sherwood Anderson's 'Winesburg, Ohio,' Reyner Banham's 'Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies' and Joan Didion's 'Play It as It Lays.' Waldie tells his story in 316 staccato takes, some of them only a sentence or two long. Writing in quick, translucent prose that's both highly specific and strangely elliptical, Mr. Waldie - a city official in Lakewood - writes of his own life in that Los Angeles suburb, conjuring up its emotional and physical geography, as well as its history and the history of that slice of California, shaped by battles over land and water. In his odd and oddly moving new memoir, 'Holy Land,' D. Suburbia as a grid of right angles, suburbia as life in a honeycomb, suburbia as a horizonless cemetery, orderly, stultifying and well groomed. Though you may have never heard of Lakewood, Calif., you will instantly recognize photographs of it: photographs taken from the air, showing rows upon rows of identical houses, each of them bounded by identical yards and identical streets.

Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.HOLY LAND A Suburban Memoir By D.

Waldie' s account of growing up in Lakewood, California, 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. 20 illustrations and a new introduction for this paperback edition. 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. 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. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. In 'quick, translucent prose' (Michiko Kakutani, 'New York Times') that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D.

Since its publication in 1996, 'Holy Land' has become an American classic.

Holy land a suburban memoir