Book Summary
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Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.
Notes From No Man's Land
A candid and engrossing look at race and racial identity.
American Essays: Notes from No Man's Land begins with a series of lynchings and finishes with a series of apologies. Eula Biss investigates race in America, and her perspective is shaped by her experiences, which include teaching in a Harlem school on 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching Katrina's aftermath from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood.
Biss' writings span the country, from New York to California to the Midwest, and span time, from biblical Babylon to Reconstruction's freedman's schools to a Jim Crow mining community to postwar white flight. She draws on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious tracts, and reality television shows to create an eclectic education on the page.
These sparse, occasionally poetic articles examine America's racial history, deftly demonstrating in intimate detail how families, schools, and communities contribute to the perpetuation of racial privilege. Despite a troubling history and a perplexing present, Biss remains optimistic about the potential of American variety, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the true intricacy of it."
Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.
