Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

I taught this book as the last reading in an undergraduate course on Western suburban history. The students responded with tremendous enthusiasm. They recognized much that was familiar in Waldie's strange hometown (a strangeness common to suburbs all over the West). This book crystallized a feeling of loss for many students. Suburbs like Lakewood, or like the tract house developments going up today all over the region and nation, feel emptied of history for the children who grow up there. Their names (Lakewood?) like their green lawns are imposed, divorced from the land's human and natural history. Children feel this and they know something is missing. This book opened up the opportunity for students to express their own feelings and experiences of suburban life.Note I also recommend you see the wonderful poetry of Kevin Hearle, _Each Thing We Know is Changed Because We Know It_ (1994)

Though subtitled "a suburban memoir", D.J. Waldie's Holy Land is a lot more than that. It is a history of the concept of suburbia, a portrait of a specific place, a chronicle of one man's relationship to that place. Formally, it is a collection of 316 prose poems, plus photographs. There is no other book like it.You don't have to be a suburbanite or a suburban exile to appreciate Waldie's incisive and insightful writing, nor do you need to be particularly interested in the tale being told. Like most truly great books, Holy Land fuses itself to your mind regardless of what is already there. The tiny chapters accumulate, and once you have read a few, reverberations begin, harmonies and discords, and soon the whole becomes much greater than the single parts. It is a thrilling reading experience.

I live in Signal Hill, right next to Lakewood. On Saturday mornings I like to get up early and get a 40 of Olde English and ride my old english 3 speed bicycle around the quiet streets of Lakewood while sipping my beer. There is an erie sense of peace and contentment that lives in this place. It's foggy usually at this time of year, and big crows caw and flap from street to street and wire to wire. big trees sit silently, there hardly ever seems to be any wind. I ride along sipping my beer, driving right up the middle of seemingly abandoned suburban streets, never bothered by cops as I would if I drove up the street drinking beer from a bottle at 8 in the morning over in Long Beach. Indeed, the only signs of life are the crows and the occaisional dog barking from behind a fence. Mr. Waldie has recreated this strange world perfectly in the pages of his book.

I can't be nearly as eloquent as the other reviewers but I found this to be a truly powerful book. My WWII-generation parents bought their first house in Lakewood in 1952 and lived there for 15 years. I have always had a fascination with Lakewood, and as corny as it may seem, always felt a kind of spiritual connection to the place. While certainly an in-depth look at the history of "my city", Waldie just as expertly explores issues such as existence and mortality. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

I have thrust this book into the hands of every other person I know. I can't remember the last time I did that. Unless you grew up in a custom home in an exclusive old neighborhood, this book is about your life and you must not let this slim volume pass. In a spare, haunting style - in fact, no chapter is longer than a page - Mr. Waldie stuns and soothes the reader, all the while illuminating and explaining the sordid underbelly of the American homebuilding industry. Mr. Waldie grew up in the same tract neighborhood where he still lives in the same house his parents purchased nearly fifty years ago. Now, he is a city official in that same mass produced town, Lakewood, California. Mr. Waldie explicates the convoluted manner that the tract home builders entwine into local politics to squeeze out every dime from the raw land. Here are answers to questions which you never realized you had, but which you will never forget. With the artistry of a poet, Waldie makes the reader "see" the underground wonderworld of water into which Southern California sinks taproots to drain ancient riverbeds a half mile below the urban sprawl that is Los Angeles. This is a rare treat. I guarantee that you will be pressing this book into the hands of friends just so you can have someone to discuss it with.