After reading an excerpt of "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" in "Writing Los Angeles," I looked forward to reading the entire work much praised by Joan Didion a writer that I admire.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed by "Holy Land's" lack of focus and sprawling, often times out of control prose.
The concept is remarkable: writing a biography of a city (Lakewood, California) and detailing it's construction, it's history, the financial and social history of it's founders and the personal history of Waldie and his family.
But it just doesn't work. What it lacks is a fire, an inner life, and the guts that pull all the disparate facts, foibles and attitudes together. As it is, it mostly just rambles from one subject to another without the unifying spark of passion.

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.

A very unique memoir of place. It makes the mudane seems holy and paints a stunning portrait of an oft-dimissed landscape. A must read.

I found this book to be highly disturbing in it's appearent repression of homosexual undertones. It was like trying to read between the lines and find the author's deep, dark (not well hidden) secrets.

The illustrations were finely penned however. They just deserved a better text to highlight them.

This book has potential, but some of the stories weren't quite as good as some of the others. Some were very outstanding and the illustrations were extremely well done! I'll be interested to see other works by this group.

this book has short stories, experimentals, as poetry. It's a good read.