Holy Land, a sparse, yet pointed memoir … has quickly inserted itself into the canon of modern suburban and cultural landscape studies. – Ryan Enos, author of The Space Between Us (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. 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. – James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die (2018) – Jean Walton, author of Fair Sex, Savage Dreams (2018)Īlthough 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. 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.
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