Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir

by D.J. Waldie

"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

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, History, Biography, Cities, Urban, 20th Century

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

D. J. Waldie is a cultural historian, memoirist, and translator. In books, essays, and online commentary, he has sought to frame the suburban experience as a search for a sense of place. Often using his hometown of Lakewood as a starting point, Waldie’s work ranges widely over the history of suburbanization and its cultural effects.

Reviews

[Heleen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Holy or not, I definitely cursed this book to hell. Waldie's prose is as unimaginative as the grid of the city he writes about. If I understand the idea of this book correctly ‒ an exploration of how the place one lives in shapes one's life ‒ there definitely is something wrong in its execution. Waldie prides himself on 'telling stories', the stories of the suburb he lives in. However, he devotes large parts of the book to the history of Lakewood's construction, including more numbers than narratives. To be honest, I do not want to read about the size of a house, park, monument and/or shopping centre five pages in a row, nor am I particularly interested in the building costs of all those things. If I were to believe Waldie, California history is indeed 'mostly about building materials', cf. section 221 and Lakewood 'a $250,000,000 planned community' (91) rather than a city. I also suspect Waldie of having written Lakewood's wikipedia page, which, like his book, consists almost entirely out of numerical facts.
There are some sections, perhaps six or seven in total, where Waldie succeeds in grasping the spirit of the suburb by relating little stories about his neighbours. I found the story about the woman who doesn't dare to ask any of her neighbours to help her cutting her Christmas tree in half beautifully poignant. It thematises the loneliness of a Christmas without family and friends. It thematises how, no matter how much these suburbs are designed to encourage community, people tend to retreat in their own solitary square.
Another character that intrigued me was Waldie's mother; the woman who wanted to live in a house where nothing could be taken from her, yet everything was. I wish Waldie had zoomed in more on how architecture shapes character and community dynamics, instead of focusing so much on the facts (facts facts facts everywhere) behind the town.
To summarise: Lakewood's wikipedia page is just as interesting as Waldie's 'literary' exploration of it ‒ not at all. Holy Land was an entirely forgettable reading experience, were it not for its excruciating boredom.

[Vince Potenza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Waldie, I grew up in the 1950s in a "development" that months before we moved in was farmland - "truck farms" was what they used to call them - only it was on the south shore of Long Island instead of outside of Los Angeles. All the houses were exactly the same. There were kids everywhere - no house on our street had less than two and one had as many as seven. Just about everybody was either Catholic or Jewish, and white. There was a Chinese family on our street - the Chans, who had five daughters - but I don't believe there was another family of color within blocks and blocks, if not miles. The elementary school and a state park were both well within walking distance, mere yards away. The nearest shopping center, movie theater, and bowling alley were only about a mile off. Going there without an adult was considered a rite of passage.

Like Waldie, all we heard about growing up was atomic and hydrogen bombs. We were less than an hour away from New York City, sure to be a major target. I remember seeing plans for a fallout shelter that the government sent my Dad. In the elementary school we had monthly air raid drills, which we mocked: "Line up in the hallway, face the wall, get down on your hands on knees, put your head between your legs and kiss your ass goodbye!"

As Waldie observes, it was not a community but a working-class neighborhood. Neighbors were neighborly, but rarely beyond that. And if it was, it was because the kids brought the stay-at-home Moms - and they all were - together, and they facilitated the friendship between the husbands.

Waldie is right when he says it wasn't stifling so much as reassuring. Of course as teenagers we began to think otherwise and by the time we graduated high school all anybody wanted to do was get the hell out and away if at all possible. But it was a wonderful place to spend a childhood and more than 55 years later I still think of it that way. It wasn't heaven - there were two suicides and two accidental deaths that I know of and there were alcoholics and divorces - but it was a sort of haven.

Great book.

[Swati · Rating 4 out of 5]

a loving defense of suburbia. it's written in strange short chapters that go from light to dark to easy to complex fast. it's hard on the stomach that way, but the very last paragraph makes it all worthwhile, and reading that chapter is like the moment you make out a magic eye picture (anyone else remember those?)

[Candice · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars.
The most captivating element of D. J. Waldie’s memoir “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” is its consummate sense of place. That said, his writing style may not be for everyone.
Waldie was the public information officer for the city of Lakewood from 1981 to 2010. Lakewood, incorporated in 1954, was the West Coast’s largest and most ambitious experiment in a new model of living following World War II: the suburb. When a large swath of bean fields was subdivided into plots for 17,500 homes and advertised, countless young families from far-flung areas were beguiled by the opportunity to move to sunny California. Once thrown together, they were expected to build a community from scratch. At its peak, the company completed a new home every seven and a half minutes.
The suburb rose from the dreams of three men, the lives of whom Waldie chronicles at length—both their business dealings and their personal lives. (In doing so, he deviates from the norms of memoir writing a bit and takes on the more traditional mantle of creative nonfictionist.) One point I found particularly poignant was that, due to the deed covenants they created, the three Jewish founders were not allowed to live in the community they themselves built.
Waldie’s parents were some of those early residents, having purchased a home in 1946. Waldie, who was born in 1948, has always lived in his childhood home. This, combined with his lifetime of service to the city he called home, made him more of an expert than could ever be possible for even the most astute researcher.
It is as if “Holy Land,” which was published in 1996, could never have been written by anyone other than the man who watched Lakewood come to life. Waldie’s sense of ordered geometry and spatial awareness transcends the story’s often-simple reportage about how the frame of each house was hammered together. It becomes a scaffolding by which the whole of “Holy Land” is constructed.
Waldie’s awareness of space and place even comes across in the book’s layout. The book is written in a meditative, spare style that evokes the tiny clapboard houses of which Waldie writes. There are 316 short sections—a very evocative number. One wonders if the 316 sections are meant to correspond to John 3:16, given that Waldie’s relationship with Catholicism is liberally dosed throughout “Holy Land” (indeed, enough to influence the title).
The author said in interviews that he chose to organize the book such that each of its 316 sections, if double-spaced, could fit on a single sheet of 8.5-by-11-inch paper. To me, this is reminiscent of the 50-by-100-foot residential lots about which he writes so poetically. The grid of Lakewood sings throughout. (However, this use of data as poetry may not seem as effective to all readers.)
Waldie possesses a mason or carpenter’s eye for detail. He meshes the deeply personal with the deeply communal. Never maudlin or self-pitying, the narrator of “Holy Land” recounts his relationships with his family, his God, his city, all the while interspersing statistics about shopping centers, or his musings about the construction of this outwardly unified yet increasingly disparate community.
The spareness and unsentimentality of the prose itself evoke Waldie’s own life and lifestyle: his living alone in the home his parents bought; his waiting for years for a relationship and a future that never came to fruition; his walking forty-five minutes each way to and from his office, because, in this city that came to define the American Dream of a new automobile in every driveway, he never learned to drive. The deaths of his parents, stretched across the narrative like a tripwire, are recounted in a similarly detached style. These stories are braided throughout the book with the stories of his childhood, of the city’s first residents, and of the city’s physical makeup itself.
I admired the way Waldie was able to play with point of view. Most of the 316 sections were written in third person, both omniscient and close-third. However, many of them were written in first person, and still more were written in second person. This might seem jumbled, but to me it worked beautifully.
When speaking of something in the past that was fairly innocuous or clearly set in the past, the narrator uses first-person clauses like “when I was five.”
But when he speaks of his present self, the narrator instead says things like “He believes, however, that each of us is crucified. His own crucifixion is the humiliation of living the life he has made for himself.” (This might be my favorite quote in the entire book.)
When he is speaking to himself, either the Waldie of yesterday or the Waldie of when the story is being written, the narrator switches to second person: “At some point in your story grief presents itself. Now, for the first time, your room is empty, not merely unoccupied.”
And when he is discussing events for which he was not present, the third-person omniscient takes hold: “The men’s faces were brown on the jaw and chin, and pale above. In the fields, only the upper part of a man’s face is shaded by his hat, salt-stained along the base of the crown.”
A lifetime’s worth of singular focus on the minutiae of Lakewood yielded much rich material, though Waldie is careful to avoid salaciousness for the sake of salaciousness. Instead, by recounting interviews with builders as well as the colorful phone calls and letters he received over the decades at City Hall, Waldie reveals much about the city’s creators and residents. He details residents who collect junk in their front yards, or elderly women who have trouble navigating daily life. He discusses California water rights in detail, as well as the area’s history, geology, and geography. By doing so, he paints a far more wide-reaching picture than would have been possible through a simple personal narrative that touched on growing up in and working in Lakewood.
He also details the early days of living in a city-that-was-not-a-city: the open construction pits in which children played and died; the clay-heavy soil particular to Lakewood, which impacted the games he and his brother played with their toy cars; the particulars with which one city tree was planted in front of each house. Rather than just state that each house got one tree, Waldie recounts which types of trees were used where; which proved the most hardy; which methods residents who did not want a tree in front of their house used to kill the tree; which methods were most effective. By showing us these details rather than telling us what they mean, Waldie allows the reader to formulate their own conclusions, and does not force them into taking sides or experiencing a particular emotion.
Waldie spent a good portion of the book describing Lakewood Center, which became the model for how future shopping centers would be built. The May Company store in the nascent mall had four massive, distinctive “M” logos atop the roof, facing in all four cardinal directions. The logo was visible all over town, Waldie said. In his narrative it took on the qualities of the ever-watching Eye of Sauron, but without resorting to any emotional or sensational language. He also wrote of how the parking lot was constructed on a slope, so as to make passersby focus on the prominently visible May Company and believe that there was plenty of parking available. Ever since I read this, I have begun scanning mall parking lots as I drive by them, looking to see if this tactic was used elsewhere.
As someone who grew up despising having to grow up in my own mid-1950s neighborhood of tract homes and writing acres of terrible poetry (and one terrible computer game) about it, I was enchanted by Waldie’s take on the suburbs, and found my own prejudices rebuked. Waldie cautioned against the dangerousness and ease of disdaining the suburbs, suggesting there was something more there for residents and readers than what stereotypes and the popular media suggest.
I was shocked to find that I believed him.

[John Boyne · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very interesting book on the creation of Lakewood, CA, which became a model of suburban development in the latter half of the 20th century. I felt the tone of the book was very depressing, which was something I was not expecting. The author appeared to portray suburban living as being primarily fake, unfulfilling, and hastily put together, which was how he described the way the early homes of Lakewood were built. I was hoping to read a narrative that provided details on the benefits of suburban living but instead seemed to want to make people who lived in suburbs to feel guilty about it. The author even ignored the tremendous wealth that has been created in suburbs that not only benefitted those suburbs but also provided monumental wealth generation for cities and the nation as a whole. I was very disappointed in that. A good read for city planning studies as well as a people's history of the 50s and 60s.

[Eric Bjerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a cool little book. I like books that I can mow through quickly and finish in a night. Didn't quite finish this one, but it will take only 30 mins. to do so. I wish it had more pictures and that the pictures had captions. It is about my birthplace, Lakewood, CA. I didn't know that Lakewood was the second oldest planned suburban area in history. We have all heard of Levittown on Long Island, well, Lakewood came a few years later, was bigger, and had the first shopping mall. Lakewood Mall was for many years the largest in the world. Anyway, lots of cool tidbits about the place I spent the first 26 years of my life.

[Cathryn Conroy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a religious book. This is not a book about Israel. This is a book about one of the largest suburban enclaves in the United States: Lakewood, California where nearly 27,000 tract houses were built over a 40-year period, selling at one point about 107 houses per hour. Between 1950 and 1952, more than 500 houses were built each week.

If you are of a certain age, chances are quite good that you grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in a similar tract home somewhere in the United States. This book is for you.

Author D.J. Waldie not only grew up in one of those Lakewood, California houses, but also he never left. After his parents died and his only brother moved out, Waldie stayed put. That means he is able to write about this "holy land" with an eye to the past and the present, and because he worked as a Lakewood city official, he even has a vision of the future.

Constructed in the shadow of the Douglas Aircraft plant, Waldie's house was one of the first sold. It is 957-square-feet of wood frame and stucco built in 1946, less than a year after end of World War II. To get a mortgage then, the man of the house had to have a job, and he had to promise to make the monthly payment. Mortgage payments began at $46.98 a month for a two-bedroom house and $53.50 for one with three. When the sales office opened on Palm Sunday in April 1950, 25,000 people were in line waiting. There were seven model houses—the first time model houses were used to boost sales.

This short book—a little more than 200 pages—is organized into 316 vignettes, some as short as a sentence or two, describing the suburb and what it was like to live there then and now. It is part prose, part poetry, part philosophy, and part puzzle. (One puzzle, for example: At times, it's confusing because in some of the vignettes, Waldie refers to himself in the first person and in others in the third person.)

There is a lot of information on the history of the area, the construction process, and the water rights, and some of that can get a bit bogged down in the minutiae in which most of us aren't interested. So while this is most definitely a fact-filled book about a place, it is also just as much a love story about its people—all those lives tucked inside all those homes on all those streets.

This is a revealing and fascinating book of social history.

[Judah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this book in one sitting on a flight.

A beautifully written memoir that uses intensely evocative imagery to examine the form that is American suburbia, for all of its faults and all of its strengths. It’s a rare portrayal without a clear agenda. While it’s not a full-scale takedown of the suburbs, it’s also far from a love letter. It’s a portrayal that calls to mind few other works of art, though the Waldie’s take on the suburbs probably shares the most DNA of anything I know with Arcade Fire’s appropriately titled 2010 album “The Suburbs.” This book has no chapters, merely numbered passages that evoke a sense of urgency to the text building up to a climactic end or reveal. It assembles anecdotes of life, history, tragedy, triumph; while they often are hard to parse on their own, they synthesize into a compelling whole. In many ways, the book’s structure mirrors its portrayal of suburban life. Always waiting for something greater to emerge, some satisfying ending or purpose for everything. It delivers an ending in line with that outlook as well- satisfying and whole, but lacking the grandeur other parts of the book alluded to. This is actually a strength, in my view. It reminds me of the film Vivarium (2020) and it’s rather bleak portrayal of life’s purpose and suburban conformity, but like the film, Holy Land finds a narrator content with that reality, and able to find meaning in it in and of itself.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 1996 memoir / history about the city of Lakewood, California, one of the first post-war suburbs built in the U.S. It's said to be remarkable as one of the few books about cookie-cutter American suburbs that is not harshly critical or ironic. It's not exactly nostalgic or glowing, but the writing is very simple and precise and sometimes veers into the spiritual. The book is less than 200 pages long, and is divided into 316 "chapters". The author said he had structured his book as a grid, similar to the way the streets of Lakewood are laid out, and each chapter is meant to be short enough to fit on a single sheet of paper in double-spaced typing. Sometimes a chapter is as short as a single sentence. This struck me as a bit contrived and literary, almost as if each chapter was meant to be a prose poem. But when he gets into more weighty topics, like the water system, the chapter divisions become meaningless; there is really no change of theme from one to the next. It's an interesting and original experiment of a book.

[Louisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted more Lakewood stories & less angsty Catholic family shit. Basically, I want to talk about buildings all day long rather than feelings.

[Sandi Banks · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is well written book of the author’s experience growing up in Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood. The author grew up there and still resides in the house he lived in with his parents. The home was built in the early 1950’s to help alleviate the housing storage of postwar California and also make for a few canny investors including Mark Taper wealthy.
The format of book with 316 short vignettes can be challenging at first but once i got into the flow I was intrigued by Waldie’s insight and information about many aspects of suburban life. The author had had a career working for the city of Lakewood and does talk about some issues of the California experience including water.
The book was recommended by an instructor from a class I took on “Suburban Nation”

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting sparse words about the author's community. He includes recollections of his family and the house in which they lived (and in which he still lives) along with a history of the area's development.

"From age six to thirteen, I spent part of nearly every day and nearly all summer in the company of my brother and other boys who lived in houses like mine.

The character of those seven years is what makes a suburban childhood seem like an entire life."

[Briege Riley]

Read this for class. Unrated for now because I don’t know my thoughts but maybe it will marinate more.

[Janet Wertman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed. Joan Didion’s blurb was given the place of prominence, and that helped set some context for the series of wry observations that made up the history/memoir/whatever.

[Susan Eubank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here are the questions we discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden.

• Why does the author juxtapose the almost non-personal tales of his life with the very detailed history of Lakewood and its land?
• What was your favorite Lakewood fact?
• Did this story resonant with any of your childhood memories?
• How did the format of the book affect your reading of it?
• What do the chapter numbers mean?
• How did his Catholicism and the other religious references affect your reading of the book? Were you able to understand the religious references? Why? Why not?
• How did the pictures affect your reading of the text?
• What are the strengths of the book?
• How did the author’s exploration of the broader history of Los Angeles and Levittown fit with his exploration of the history of Lakewood?
• Why didn’t he ever call it Lakewood? Did he call it Lakewood?
• Was he accurate in his thoughts on the landscape and trees?
• Why is it called Holy Land?

[Andrew Frakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is among the very best books I've ever read, and it's certainly the best memoir I've ever read. Waldie does things with narrative that have haunted me since the last time I read the book (I read it three times in two weeks) -- his ability to thread through formative experience and everything that's come since then is truly impressive. But what's even more impressive is his ability to describe and paint a scene for the reader without giving way to lyrical passages and overworked adjective-heavy writing.

This is a book that comes across as a brutally honest look at a city, a man, a religion and a way of American life that you'll be able to relate to, even if you're young, even if you're not a Catholic, even if you've never set foot in a tract-housing 'burb in your life. Put down the cost of admission and read it.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this laconic, lyrical memoir of growing up in Lakewood, CA, a quintessential example of the instant, mass produced suburbias of postwar Los Angeles: thousands of nearly identical tarpaper shacks built around shopping malls, delivering a segregated, mass consumption-oriented version of American dream. I grew up in one of these suburbs, 25 years after Waldie did, and truly it was one of the most anomic places in human history, and Waldie does a beautiful job describing the political ecology of this alienation-by-design.

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the story of how Lakewood, CA (the city directly across the street from my house) was developed just after WWII. The writing was all over the place - part history lesson, part personal memoir. I would have enjoyed it more had it focused less on the soil composition part and more on the personal stories of the first people to live in one of the first mass planned communities in the United States.

[Dustin Hanvey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent poetic-novel mix that provides a biography/ history of Lakewood, CA, one of the first modern style suburbs in America. In the process, Waldie exposes the ways in which most of us live today help create our ways of being, interacting, and connecting with people around us. He also incorporates the spiritual aspects of place and how they shaped him and his family. I learned a lot about Los Angeles history and how my own suburb has become a sort of "holy land" for my family.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thoughtful and personal books ever written about the making of (physically and emotionally) an American suburb, by someone who lived in it all his life. I first read it in 1997 and I still re-read it often, just to marvel at it. It somehow gets at the essence of family, community and faith, while remaining a very observant and even critical look at how we lived, and still live, in our own little world of suburbs, until we move on to better suburbs.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent and unique memoir. DJ Waldie grew up in Lakewood, an early post-WWII subdivision in California, and now lives in the home he grew up in. In hundreds of brief sections he explores the nature of the subdivision, its history, and the surrounding ecology. It is neither "sentimental" nor "contemptuous." Instead it's moving and lovely. "The design of this suburb compelled a conviviality that people got used to and made into a substitute for choices, including not choosing at all."

[Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most unique...

Truly the most fascinating and engaging memoirs I've ever consumed a perfectly imperfect account of the earliest american suburbs. You are lead on a wonderful yet ordinary journey of a raw suburban place, with no frills or editorializing from the author. Its simply an experience, like taking his walk through town, and through time. This is a eally nice way to understand what suburbs did to people and what people did to them.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book that has stayed with me through the years. I lost my copy along the way and recently purchased it again. I hope it's as good as I remember.

Waldie lays out the story like the suburban grid of his home town of Lakewood, California. The structure of the book adds to uniformity he grew up with. It's perfect for the ADD reader, like myself.

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a school issued novel, it had the storyline that most lacked to keep me interested. Would I have ever read this or enjoyed this outside of the school setting? Probably not. Seemed a little aimless at times, but I pushed through it.

[Joe Fox · Rating 1 out of 5]

Painful read. I'd rather read the blue prints to my house...oh wait, I just did, it's called Holy Land.

[Trent · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good. If you love Lakewood/Long Beach, it's a nostalgic read. I sat in Starbucks and knocked it out while listening to a Glen Miller spotify playlist... very nostalgic!

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had this book on my list for a long, long time.

I'm a resident of LA, I write a blog, I photograph this city, I'm intensely interested in LA and Southern California and the history of development here, as well as the environmental and social circumstances that lead to the creation of this region.

This is a story of growing up in 1950s Lakewood, CA, a post-war town of lookalike houses, stay-at-home moms and working dads. It's about a plain place stuck somewhere where they drilled for water and found enough to erect thousands of wood homes for returning veterans and their families.

Waldie has an exhaustive and detailed knowledge of the building of these houses, down to the size of the lots, the costs of the development, the stories of the founders, the building of sewers, roads, sidewalks, parks; the prejudices that governed the town and ensured it stayed all-white for many decades; the underground aquifer that was supposed to last for decades and dried up in a few years.

And the book is written in brief paragraphs, maybe 5-10 lines long. This is the biggest surprise for it makes it have an aura of a tome or a pocket bible, and it is surely wise in its insertion of religious, spiritual, national, familial and ecological wisdom, sprinkled throughout.

Unique, special, wise, brief and brilliant, this is a product of a brilliant mind disguised as an ordinary story of an ordinary town.

[Daniel Nelms · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since I am currently ministering as a pastor in Suburbia, I've embarked on a journey to read through literature about Suburbia - it's history and development, and all the impacts of it. This is the second book I've read. It's a short book, but not worth moving through quickly. It is uniquely organized into 300 mini-subsets of chapters, and it is a captivating read. It is not necessarily a personal memoir, as much as it is a memoir of a Suburban town, while also applying to much of the suburban neighbors around the country. The author grew up in the same house in the same town, and as an adult, still lives in the same house and the same town. His perspectives and observations are deep, moving and profound.

Again, unique read and a fascinating read. So very glad I've read it. It gives you much to consider about the values of Suburbia and its impact on its residents. I'm also shocked (as I dig more into the origins of Suburbia) the intentional segregation that was enforced from day one. There is a reason why much of Suburbia is 90+% white, and non-white neighbors are "across the tracks" - the government originally wanted it that way and even designed it that way, marketed it that way, and gave federal funds to ensure it was that way. Another dark spot in our nation's history.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd heard about this book when it was selected by the California Book Club. It interested me, but it wasn't easy to find, being out of print and not at my library. A year and a bit later, I found it in a little free library by my house. What a lucky find! This book has been on my bedside ever since, as it's perfect for reading in little bites. It's essentially small meditations on neighborhood and suburbia. Although it's about D. J. Waldie's specific community of Lakewood, a grid of houses all built at once, which is very different than my neighborhood, a haphazard collection of houses built at different times, I was able to find connection to it. My house was built in the same postwar time as his neighborhood. The poetry of finding place is true in any case. And since my town was going through the destructive, disruptive fire of 2025, reflecting on what makes a neighborhood fit my mood. In addition to the reflective, almost poetic vignettes, there is also a lot of very local history. While much of the specific history is about the development of Lakewood, I also learned a little about Los Angeles, about the building of the downtown grid, and about the water table, for instance. Overall it's been a delight to savor over many evenings.

[Lilibeth Garcia · Rating 2 out of 5]

oof. i slogged through this, and by the midway point when i realized the book wasn't building torward anything different than what it was, i reluctantly soldiered on till the end. i almost dnf'd multiple times, but i wanted to finish it because it was a recommendation. it contained all the themes i love (christianity, mysticism, LA, suburbia, even poetry), but it ultimately was not for me.

i thought it would be more narrativized and prosaic, but instead most snippets were terse, clinical descriptions of mid-century construction techniques, urban planning, and LA development history. there were some lovely images that i made note of, but i didn't connect w/ them or connect them to the rest of the book in any meaningful way.

my expectations were led astray by it being marketed as a memoir, when - although written in a "literary" structure - *holy land* is for all intents and purposes a history textbook.

maybe i'll think of it again many years from now if i ever become a homeowner (but as a zillenial, i'm not holding my breath).