"Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original."—Joan Didion
Since its publication in 1996, Holy Land has become an American classic. In "quick, translucent prose" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) that is at once lyrical and unsentimental, D. J. Waldie recounts growing up in Lakewood, California, a prototypical post-World War II suburb. 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. 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. 20 illustrations and a new introduction for this paperback edition. 20 illustrations
D. J. Waldie was named one of the city's most influential interpreters by "Los Angeles Magazine" in 2006 and called "a gorgeous distiller of architectural and social history" by the New York Times in 2007. In 2008, novelist and memoirist Patricia Hampl, writing in "Commonweal," said of Holy Land: A Sunurban Memoir, "(It) captivated me when it first came out. It still astonishes. It's no easier to describe now than it was before it became a classic of American autobiography. Waldie's range is staggering - from intimate, touchingly respectful revelations of family life and spiritual reality to a precise history of land development and public policy regarding water use (and don't imagine this is the boring part). Waldie has written nothing less than the spiritual autobiography of the midcentury American suburban dream. It proves to be a subject worthy of tragedy and of his remarkable elegy."
D. J. Waldie is a contributing writer at "Los Angeles Magazine" and a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.
