{"product_id":"holy-land-a-suburban-memoir","title":"Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir","description":"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. Waldiewas named on of the '100 coolest people in L.A.' byBuzzmagazine and was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in the house his parents bought in Lakewood, California, where he is a city official. California Book Award Winner This is 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, and profound,Holy Landis an uncompromising, passionate statement of the hard-won values of American suburban places. 'Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.'Joan Didion 'Welcome to the first church of the suburbs. LetHoly Landbe your bible.'Los Angeles Times 'An astonishing book, unsentimental, baleful, yet oddly affecting. I have never read anything quite like it.'Witold Rybczynski 'WithHoly 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 Landranks with the best of them. With spare fact, minimalist prose, and rich emotion Waldie has managed to present the rise of suburban Southern California in its full complexity.'Dr. Kevin Starr, author ofAmericans and the California Dream 'Part memoir, part social history, this odd collection of reflections should resonate with anyone who has experienced the profound loneliness of life in suburbia. Waldie is a poet, one ofBuzzmagazine's 100 certified cool people, and a public information officer of Lakewood, Calif. He has written a bizarre, often nonsequential, collection of anecdotes and observations on the oppressively gridlike layout of the suburb in which he still lives, city planning, flood control, estrangement between neighbors or between parents and children, Catholicism, and bureaucracy. Waldie's flat, terse, and often emotionless prose seems jarringly appropriate to this description of an environment characterized by painful aesthetic monotony and emotional distance. Waldie skillfully traces Lakewood's evolution in the context of the rise of the suburbs, tract housing, shopping centers, and the 1950s illusion that everyone could be middle class ('Middle-class houses are the homes of people who would not live here'). As a city official, he comes in contact with Lakewood's most eccentric residents; his descriptions of them, factual and stripped of explicit judgment or commentary, are both funny and desperately sad. Mrs. A. perpetually invents conspiracies that implicate the city, the cable company, NASA, and the fast-food fry cook who raped her. One man complains about the red traffic signals he encounters on his way home from work: he wants the city to make them all green, all the time.'Kirkus Reviews 'Waldie, the public information officer for Lakewood, California, brings that suburb to life by interweaving a plethora of historical facts and statistical details with brief anecdotes about community residents. Ironically, these anecdotes tend to focus on those who violated community norms. His work, organized into 316 brief sections, combines personal narrative with a history of real-estate dev","brand":"D.J. Waldie","offers":[{"title":"Very good","offer_id":44273986863203,"sku":"2058827-very-good","price":3.5,"currency_code":"KWD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/qasralthaqafa.com\/products\/holy-land-a-suburban-memoir","provider":"Qasr Al-Thaqafa","version":"1.0","type":"link"}