Lakewood, California

The NY Times has a feature on Tom Johnson's new Book about Lakewood, California Lakewood: Portraits of a Sacred American Suburb. It looks like an interesting book.

This isn't the only loving memoir of Lakewood, however. D.J. Waldie wrote a book called Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, which is great and I recommend it.

Something about Lakewood clearly affects people. Certainly the tired and counter-productive tropes about the soul-sucking powers of suburbs are meaningless for Lakewood (as they are everywhere, for that matter).