Holy Land

Description

This is an exquisitely realized and wholly original memoir of growing up in blue-collar 1950s Lakewood, California, the quintessential post-World War II American suburb and the prototype for the countless tract developments that would follow. At once a portrait of the author's coming of age, as well as a history of Lakewood, Holy Land is about the way places shape lives. It's about the difficulties of ordinariness - both good and bad. It's a collection of intensely observed and felt episodes in the making of a city that parallel the making of a life. It's about the resonance of mundane choices - how wide a street should be, how to lease stores in a shopping mall, what to name a park. The author captures, in snapshot-like precise prose, the familiar moments of a suburban childhood - playing Monopoly in a back bedroom, an afternoon at the public swimming pool, the intimacy among brothers. It offers us a portrait of suburbia, not unlike the suburbia of all our childhoods.

First Sentence

That evening he thought he was becoming his habits, or even morehe thought he was becoming the grid he knew.

Excerpt

That evening he thought he was becoming his habits, or even morehe thought he was becoming the grid he knew.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Holy Land: A Suburban MemoirW. W. Norton & Company2005-04-01
• Holy landW.W. Norton1996-01-01
• Holy landBuzz Book for St. Martin's Press1997-01-01
• Holy LandNorton & Company, Incorporated, W. W.2005-01-01
• Holy LandW. W. Norton & Company2005-04-01