Thea Gallo Becker, Lakewood (Arcadia, 2003)

There comes a time, if you review enough Arcadia Press books, that you will find yourself repeating the same things over and over again. Well, that time has come. Lakewood is the seventh or eighth Arcadia book I've reviewed, and almost everything I have to say about it is something I've said before. (As I live in Lakewood, anything that would be different would be "hey wow, I know all these places!" comments that really have nothing to do with the book itself.) So if you've read my previous Arcadia reviews, I apologize, bear with me.

Lakewood, like all of Arcadia's Images of America books, is one hundred twenty-eight pages of mostly photographs, with a couple of introductory paragraphs at the beginning of each section and captions on the photos being the only textual material in the book. If you've read some of the better Arcadia books, you'll know how much coherence can actually be packed into so little text (William Burg's Sacramento books are, in my experience, the gold standard for getting the photographs to actually tell a coherent story); most Arcadia books, however, are not as concerned with telling a coherent story as they are with packing as much information as possible into those hundred twenty-eight pages. Lakewood follows this formula, abandoning any effort at tracing, say, one family down through the years for a more macro approach. Still, it's interesting stuff, and well worth checking into for the armchair traveller or the town resident who wants to see how things evolved from the earliest days to the present. I like these books, and, as a rule, recommend them. ***