Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir is a surreally realist chronicle of Lakewood California, the “world’s largest” subdivision built, overnight, in the 50s. – Jean Walton, author of Fair Sex, Savage Dreams (2018)ĭ. Waldie’s spare and devastating Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir for its formal discipline, and for some kind of magic it performs in seamlessly linking the intimacy of the author’s lived experience of his family home in Lakewood, CA with the sweeping history of postwar suburban housing tracts. I’d put this book up against the best of Baudrillard and Banham. Waldie’s meditation on suburbia finds the beauty in wonky detail and weaves a wholly unconventional narrative. – Ryan Enos, author of The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (2017) More than anything I’ve ever read, ( Holy Land) captures the torment and tenderness of the mundane and how that is shaped by our environment. – James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die (2018) Although it’s labeled as such, to call a memoir does not quite do justice to the magic it works, invoking the numinous in the anonymous through an almost sacramental act of attention. One of the quirkiest, most original, most poignant books published in the 1990s, its inspiration springs from the blandest of muses-the American suburb. – Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic (2012) Holy Land is one of the ‘25 most significant books on Southern California architecture and urbanism’ – Patricia Hampl, novelist and memoirist (2008) – Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Critic (1996) Moving back and forth effortlessly between the personal and the communal, between memories of his own childhood and statistics combed from public records, (Waldie) creates a moving portrait of his hometown, and in doing so he manages to give this faceless suburb, long held up as an archetype of suburban anonymity, a local habitation and a name. Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.
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