Holy Land
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Holy Land
D. J. Waldie
Biography & Memoir
James Mustich
Aug 1, 2018
This book is a remarkable paradox: One of the quirkiest, most original, most poignant books published in the 1990s, its inspiration springs from the blandest of muses—the American suburb. And not the affluently disenchanted sort of community whose emotional tangles have been so lovingly conjured by Cheever and Updike, but rather Lakewood, California, at “the extreme southeast corner of Los Angeles County”—an example of the mass-produced, mid-twentieth-century “new” suburb that’s older than all of them but the original, Levittown, New York. Composed in 316 short bits, some only a sentence or two long, none more than a page, the book details the history of Lakewood’s development, from the financing of the land purchase to the clearing of the plots, the marking off of streets, and the erection of houses in a frenzy of construction efficiency. It is that rarest of testaments, a summoning of spirits both happy and humble, or, as Waldie put it after its publication, “It’s about longing for what you already have.”
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DreesReads
Nov 4, 2018
Another winner I rarely see mentioned.
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