Book Review on "Holy Land the Thematic Thread"

Book Review 5 pages (1344 words) Sources: 1 Style: Chicago

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Holy Land

The thematic thread of Holy Land, by D.J. Waldie is the contrasting representation of the world as something that can be contrived and look perfect on the surface, while at the same time be on the brink of total upheaval. Waldie stresses that the building of suburbia was a collective effort that was fraught with contradictions, not the least of which was those who planned and owned the majority of the town of Lakewood, California would have been unable to live there because they were Jewish. Another interesting social contrast was the physical character of the place, where all the houses were the same, built upon streets on a grid and yet the local shopping center, all part of the design held a bomb shelter that reflected the real social fear of the Soviet cold war.

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 expenancy 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.

The author mixes prose poetry with poignant period photographs of the places of his youth and the development of what suburbia would be known as for the whole of its social development, a "perfect" place with contradictions and secrets. "It rained once for an entire week in 1953, when I was five. The flat streets flooded. Schools closed. Only the rain happened, while I waited at the window. Waiting was one of the first things I understood fully. Rain and the hydrogen bomb were two aspects of the same loss." Waldie, creates a picture of understanding that is reflective of a five-year-old, concepts that created conflict were all equal, rain and the flat streets were incompatible and created chaos and the hydrogen bomb loomed above the heads of all who tread on such perfect streets, which made them both the harbingers of things that made you have to wait and watch, expectantly like a five-year-old at the window waiting for the sun and life to return to normal.

Waldie has been in the place for so long that he remembers the farms that had once covered the whole of the land, but slowly disappeared to harbor more and more straight, flat streets that come to represent the industry of man over what once was nature. "Before they put a grid over it, and restrained the ground from indifference, any place was as good as any other." Yet, now, Lakewood became something that was better, wholly man made and developed over night into a sprawl of unprecedented real and ideal proportions. Waldie's emphasis on the pattered and planned process of building, evidenced by the period black and white aerial photographs of Lakewood is demonstrative of the growth he experiences as a young boy growing up during the peak of Red fear.

Waldie describes the event of a house sale in his neighborhood where the new owner discovers that the previous owner has built his own personal bomb shelter, a shelter that the city engineer, believes is unstable and therefore must be filled in. In this tract of the work, Waldie describes the tenor of the whole nation, the fact that children and adults were fully "trained for a conflict that never came." A result of fear that was indoctrinated into people from every corner of safety and in children from their most trusted of authorities;

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