D.J. Waldie: "Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses "Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir," by D.J. Waldie, set in Lakewood, California. The writer describes how Waldie mixes prose poetry with poignant period photographs of the places of his youth and the development of suburbia during the Cold War. Themes such as the soldiers returning from WWII, the Red scare, the building of bomb shelters, the climate of an entire area, and the changes in Waldie's community over the years he lived there, are covered in this book. Thus, the work reflects not only a single man's life journey, but the life and hopes of the evolving eras he has lived through.

From the Paper:

"Waldie, though he does frequently develop a sense of the childlike existence he lived in Lakewood also very much gives the impression of a memoir, where the individual is looking back, seeing the events of his childhood through the eyes of both the adult he is now and the child he believed he was then. He frames his community with both love and regret for the source of lessons he learned and yet he turns the majority of those lessons to the positive, even when the core was negative and fear based. The work is iconic in that it is peppered with both the golden glow of expectancy of growth, development and childlike wonder as well as real confrontational issues and standards that stress the social and political climate of the era in which Waldie grew up."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Waldie, D.J. Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir. New York: W.W. Norton. 1996.

More papers on D.J. Waldie: "Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir":

• Book Review # 96465 : "City of Angels?"
• Analytical Essay # 128207 : "Suburbia" in Literature"
• Essay # 31679 : "The O.J. Simpson Investigation"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: