Holy land

the long version

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.