Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
by Eula Biss
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Book Summary Information
Author: Eula BissEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-03
ISBN: 1555975186
Number of pages: 208
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Book Reviews of Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Book Review: Eula Biss: Essayist extraordinaire
Summary: 5 Stars
Several weeks ago, I happened upon Eula Biss reading her essay, "Time and Distance Overcome" on C-SPAN's BookTV. She was in the midst of the essay, which uses telephone poles to convey several themes about America, including the inherent racism represented by our history.
The telephone pole allowed wires to be strung, linking communities and eventually the entire country. We now view this and Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone as wondrous things. Biss points out in her essay that Americans at that time opposed telephone poles vociferously.
She writes about the New York Times in 1889 reporting a "War on Telephone Poles." Biss tells us that as soon as the telephone company erected a new pole, home owners and business owners would saw it down, even resorting to defending their properties from telephone poles with rifles.
According to Biss, newspaper editorials at the time considered telephone poles as contributors to urban blight.
Telephone poles also made convenient stations upon which to lynch blacks, something I never learned in history class, and wouldn't have known, if this essay by Biss, contained in her collection of essays, Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays.
Biss doesn't blame telephone poles. They were merely an instrument, a practical one at that given that they were tall and straight, had a cross bar, and they stood in public places, making them great for humiliation and degradation, key elements of lynchings.
Writing about telephone poles and lynchings might seem perverse, and evoke discomfort from readers, Biss conveys something about America in this essay, about racism from our nation's past that is not common knowledge, even though telephone poles are ubiquitous.
Her essays are like that. She looks at things, like race in America, and the prevalence of fear in our country, through a lens somewhat altered from the norm.
We also learn from Biss that her father told her that her grandfather was a telephone lineman and "broke his back when a telephone pole smashed him against the road."
While all of the essays have a thematic center, which is race in America, a subject fraught with peril for any writer, Biss never comes across as heavy-handed, or haranguing readers, and the essays aren't about ideological axe-grinding.
Throughout "Notes from No Man's Land," Biss regularly shows her adeptness and skill as a writer, tackling tough subjects in each essay, but always with a twist or turn that took you somewhere different than you originally thought you were going. In the process, you admired the journey, and how Biss made you think about her points.
This is Biss's first full-length work, made possible when she won Graywolf's Nonfiction Prize for 2008.
I'm sure this will be the first of many books from Biss, as this first book of essays is a winner.
Summary of Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismWinner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity
In a book that begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies, Eula Biss explores race in America. Her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago?s most diverse neighborhood.
As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman?s schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows.
These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, ?not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it.?
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