Rating: 
Summary: consecrating what seems beyond redemption
Review: Mr. Waldie not only captures the subtle grace at work--and often obscured--in suburban lives and landscapes, he also confers grace upon the subjects of his sparse, elegant writing. This is a luminous and numinous work, a model of creative nonfiction.
Rating:
Summary: consecrating what seems beyond redemption
Review: Mr. Waldie not only captures the subtle grace at work--and often obscured--in suburban lives and landscapes, he also confers grace upon the subjects of his sparse, elegant writing. This is a luminous and numinous work, a model of creative nonfiction.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing & Important
Review: Though subtitled "a suburban memoir", D.J. Waldie's Holy Land is a lot more than that. It is a history of the concept of suburbia, a portrait of a specific place, a chronicle of one man's relationship to that place. Formally, it is a collection of 316 prose poems, plus photographs. There is no other book like it.You don't have to be a suburbanite or a suburban exile to appreciate Waldie's incisive and insightful writing, nor do you need to be particularly interested in the tale being told. Like most truly great books, Holy Land fuses itself to your mind regardless of what is already there. The tiny chapters accumulate, and once you have read a few, reverberations begin, harmonies and discords, and soon the whole becomes much greater than the single parts. It is a thrilling reading experience.
Rating:
Summary: A unique and moving chronicle of Americana
Review: Though subtitled "a suburban memoir", D.J. Waldie's Holy Land is a lot more than that. It is a history of the concept of suburbia, a portrait of a specific place, a chronicle of one man's relationship to that place. Formally, it is a collection of 316 prose poems, plus photographs. There is no other book like it. You don't have to be a suburbanite or a suburban exile to appreciate Waldie's incisive and insightful writing, nor do you need to be particularly interested in the tale being told. Like most truly great books, Holy Land fuses itself to your mind regardless of what is already there. The tiny chapters accumulate, and once you have read a few, reverberations begin, harmonies and discords, and soon the whole becomes much greater than the single parts. It is a thrilling reading experience.
Rating: 
Summary: a tour of a world very different than suburbs I know
Review: When I read this book, I was surprised by not by how universal Lakewood is, but how little Lakewood resembles the suburbs I grew up with.
In Lakewood, most blocks have sidewalks, streets have grids so you can walk to anyplace without going out of your way, and conveniences such as shopping are a long walk away- not exactly New Urbanism, but not exactly conventional modern sprawl either. Lakewood may be sprawl, but it is sprawl with a human face.
By contrast, in Atlanta (where I grew up) sidewalks end about 3 or 4 miles from downtown, in subdivisions built at about the same time as Lakewood or even a few years either- and usually nothing is within walking distance of a suburban house, and even if it was the absence of sidewalks (or often of any other accommodation to pedestrians such as walkable lawns; the streets often go right up to the street) would make walking very dangerous indeed. Atlanta is sprawl without a human face. I think Atlanta is certainly more typical of the South.
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