Whenever I find myself in the midst of neat green lawns, turquoise skies and stuccoed ranch houses, I get short of breath. It turns out I'm not alone. In his new memoir, "Blue Sky Dream," journalist David Beers recalls blissfully going up in a single-prop airplane with his pilot father at the age of 8, and as his dad pointed out their suburban Northern California neighborhood below, feeling suddenly "terrified." And D. J. Waldie, in "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir," describes an aerial photograph taken of his native Lakewood, a Southern California subdivision laid out according to a plan as precise as graph paper: "Seen from above," he writes, "the grid is beautiful and terrible."

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