Reviews of Notes From No Man's Land

“Biss, inquisitive and buoyant, swings back and forth between the shores of nurture and nature, asking tough questions about which aspects of race and culture we inherit and which we acquire.…Matters of race, sense of self, and belonging involve everyone, and Biss’ crossing-the-line perspective will provoke fresh analysis of our fears and expectations.”

“These essays are a brave and honest account of Biss’s journeys through space and the inner self. Like Blake, that other mystic poet, she sees the world in a grain of sand. Without missing a beat, she looks at a telephone pole as a symbol of our universal connection, the intrusion of technology, an instrument of lynch mobs, a reminder of her grandfather’s death, and a symbol of life sprouting new leaves even after it is strung with wires. Every page sparkles with imagination.”

“‘Gangs are real, but they are also conceptual,’ Eula Biss says, and the wide embrace of that observation speaks well for her essays, which are always ideologically alive even as they are grounded in fascinating details: children’s dolls, the history of telephone poles, the saga of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. But this book is no miscellany. All of Biss’s explorations finally address race in the United States, from someone whose life seems devoted to that great pondering...and so this is an essential (and quintessential) American book.”