Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
by Eula Biss

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $7.05
You Save: $7.95 (53%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $5.00 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions


(Click here)
Buy this book at online book store in your country
Canada | UK | Germany | France

Book Summary Information

Author: Eula Biss
Edition: 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 Criticism
Winner 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.?

Essays Books

Book Subjects
Most talked about in Essays Books
Shaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings ImageShaking a Leg: Collected Journalism and Writings
by Angela Carter
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1998-12-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $20.66
Price in other shops: $39.00
Minerva Louise (Picture Lions) ImageMinerva Louise (Picture Lions)
by Janet Morgan Stoeke
Picture Lions; Published: 1989-09-21; Paperback; Book
White Dynamite and Curly Kidd ImageWhite Dynamite and Curly Kidd
by Bill Martin, John Archambault
Collins; Published: 1988-08; Hardcover; Book
max's christmas Imagemax's christmas
by rosemary wells
Dial; Published: 1986; Hardcover; Book
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book ImageLost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
by Walker Percy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 1983-06-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $66.99
Shadow Lines: Educational Edition, with Critical Essays by A N Kaul, Suvir Kaul, Meenakshi Mukherjee & Rajesewari Sunder rajan ImageShadow Lines: Educational Edition, with Critical Essays by A N Kaul, Suvir Kaul, Meenakshi Mukherjee & Rajesewari Sunder rajan
by Amitav Ghosh
South Asia Books/Oxford Univ Press, India; Published: 1998-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $29.24
The Book of Other People ImageThe Book of Other People
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 2008-01-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $6.91
Price in other shops: $15.00
Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin American Library) ImageWalden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin American Library)
by Henry David Thoreau
Penguin Classics; Published: 1983-08-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $5.62
Price in other shops: $12.00
The Portable Machiavelli ImageThe Portable Machiavelli
by Niccolo Machiavelli
Penguin (Non-Classics); Published: 1979-01-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $11.35
Price in other shops: $20.00
Essays of E.B. White ImageEssays of E.B. White
by E. B. White
Joanna Cotler Books; Published: 1978-10-19; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $298.32
Similar Books and other products
On Looking: Essays ImageOn Looking: Essays
by Lia Purpura
Sarabande Books; Published: 2006-08-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.12
Price in other shops: $14.95
Humiliation (Big Ideas//Small Books) ImageHumiliation (Big Ideas/ / Small Books)
by Wayne Koestenbaum
Picador; Published: 2011-08-02; Paperback; Book
Best price: $3.99
Price in other shops: $14.00
Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present ImageTouchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present
Touchstone; Published: 2007-12-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.63
Price in other shops: $20.00
What It Is ImageWhat It Is
by Lynda Barry
Drawn and Quarterly; Published: 2008-05-13; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $10.45
Price in other shops: $24.95
The Next American Essay ImageThe Next American Essay
by John D'Agata
Graywolf Press; Published: 2002-02-28; Paperback; Book
Best price: $10.00
Price in other shops: $20.00
The White Album: Essays (FSG Classics) ImageThe White Album: Essays (FSG Classics)
by Joan Didion
Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Published: 2009-11-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.00
Price in other shops: $14.00
Diversity, Oppression, and Social Functioning: Person-In-Environment Assessment and Intervention (3rd Edition) ImageDiversity, Oppression, and Social Functioning: Person-In-Environment Assessment and Intervention (3rd Edition)
by George A. Appleby, Edgar A. Colon, Julia Hamilton
Prentice Hall; Published: 2010-03-25; Paperback; Book
Best price: $74.55
Price in other shops: $99.40
Quotidiana ImageQuotidiana
by Patrick Madden
University of Nebraska Press; Published: 2010-03-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $16.85
Price in other shops: $23.95
The Balloonists ImageThe Balloonists
by Eula Biss
Hanging Loose Press; Published: 2002-02-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.00
About a Mountain ImageAbout a Mountain
by John D'Agata
W. W. Norton & Company; Published: 2011-02-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.50
Price in other shops: $14.95
Book store. Illustrated catalog of books on different categories