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Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays

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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.

In each essay, in prose that refuses to draw attention to itself, Biss methodically marches us to the edge and over, into the dark and seldom recognized truth about the state of race relations in America. I'm amazed by her unflinching eye and its deadly accuracy.

One of the best books I've read in the last few years, Notes from No Man's Land by Eula Biss is educational, provocative, sensitive and hard to put down.
Essays that have an intentionality, but without an argumentative tone, which opens the narrative up to new directions and takes the reader by surprise in a refreshing way. I found it compelling to read it front to back, not to dip in and out. The final chapter is notes on each of the essays and some of her motivations for researching them.

I have read that this type of writing is called "braided narrative" or lyric essays. She weaves the historical information that she has researched into a narrative, and it engaged me immediately. I think these essays are more accessible to a wide variety of readers in part due to her use of fascinating details hinged to something current and easily relevant. Eula Biss' voice has an aliveness to it.

How is it that only three people have reviewed this book on amazon? I bought several copies to give as high school graduation gifts and for close friends. The autobiographical aspects, when she integrates them into her work, were evocative and invited me into her life in a way that felt intimate, but not in such a way that it detracted from the whole. Reading these essays, especially after I finished and was reflecting on them, sometimes left me stunned, speechless, inspired, and quietly aware of themes in our country about race that I was oblivious to before. Consciousness in action.

This is a thoughtful, thought provoking and insightful book. Be sure and read the last chapter where the author discusses what inspired many of the essays included in the book. We had our book group read it. It was rated highly by every person in the group.

Provocative and lyric essays about race and about living today in America, each essay shows Eula Biss deadly accuracy.

One of them, "Good Bye to all that", is about New York and an honest argument to the essay Joan Didion wrote years ago with the same title about New York city. For the most part of it Biss took Didion's sentences structures, changing the words, and other times took both the structure and the words, changing the meaning, and it's amazing. Even if you don't know Didion essay -- that is free in the Internet ([...])-- -- Biss essay on NY it's an amazing piece of prose

In the final chapter Biss discusses what inspired many of the essays included in the book and in the end the judges's afterwords explain the choice of the book as the winner of Graywolf's Nonfiction Prize for 2008

I loved this book so much. Eula Biss is sharp and insightful, and her writing is gorgeous. I didn't always agree with her ideas, but her stories and writing are so strong, and besides, agreeing isn't the point. I strongly recommend this book. It's a clear and original look at America, through a very personal lens.