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4.0 

Notes from No Man's Land

By Eula Biss
Notes from No Man's Land by Eula Biss digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

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

Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and 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."

70 Reviews

4.0
“3.5 stars One of Biss’ earlier works, Notes from No Man’s Land is an essay collection grappling with whiteness and white guilt in America. In the words of Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey (that Biss’ cites), treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity. Biss, in the end notes, acknowledges the generational wealth that whites in America acquire from inflation of properties that were buoyed by racist housing policies, where between 1934 and 1962 the FHA and Veterans Administration financed $120 billion worth of housing, only 2% of which went to nonwhite families. Biss, despite having such a keen eye for materialist and labour history, is quite limited in engaging fully with the material repercussions of her inheritance as a white woman in America, and while she is able to suggest a social revolt against the idea of white nicety, doesn’t go further. This collection intensely reads as a response to Didion’s own reportings on Americana – Biss, who did not grow up with all the obscene wealth of a military contractor father in the 1950s, avoids the liberal haughtiness of Didion (who would say such things as “privileged is an accusation”. Rest In Peace though). Didion’s shadow and influence is most apparent in “Goodbye to All That”, Biss’ essay on New York in conversation with Didion’s own 1967 piece, which borrowed the title from Robert Grave’s 1929 war memoir. What I really appreciate about Biss, as I’ve mentioned above, is her interest in labour and unions (in Notes, she cites both the optimistically utopic Buxton, a coal mining village with solidarity between Black and white workers, as well as the competition of Irish emigrants against the Black working class (the story of how the Irish rose up the ranks of subjugation in the US to “become white”. I think she might genuinely be one of the most exciting mainstream white American (that’s a lot of modifiers) essayists writing today, and one of the only ones with such a leftist slant. The 3.5 stars for this is honestly just because I think Biss’ other works are stronger, and there’s only so much you can say about race as a white American in the 2000s.”

About Eula Biss

EULA BISS is the author of The Balloonists. She teaches nonfiction writing at Northwestern University and is co-editor of Essay Press. Her essays have appeared in Harper's and The Believer. She lives in Chicago.

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