false 60913 5523292 1555975186 9781555975180 21 http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5523292.Notes_from_No_Man_s_Land_American_Essays 4.34 70 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.”]]> 60913 4.19 172 48 2009 105241 1931236070 9781931236072 10 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171547755m/105241.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171547755s/105241.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/105241.The_Balloonists 4.35 57 60913 4.19 172 48 2002 6339699 0547241607 9780547241609 17 http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/63/699/6339699-m-1255792649.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/books/63/699/6339699-s-1255792649.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6339699-the-best-american-nonrequired-reading-2009 3.73 45 This "great volume" highlights the "very best of this year's fiction, nonfiction, alternative comics, screenplays, blogs and more" (OK!). Compiled by Dave Eggers and students from his San Francisco writing center, it is "both uproarious and illuminating" (Publishers Weekly).

</DIV>]]> 3371 3.75 89602 11547 6238 4.18 31570 4228 1075562 3.15 1077 381 3134705 3.73 45 17 2198058 3.75 48 17 1431785 3.84 1674 547 6468 3.87 10125 1644 2895822 3.74 46 17 3134706 3.73 45 17 3134707 3.73 45 17 56758 3.63 517 145 915909 3.73 45 17 3134708 3.73 45 17 3134709 3.73 45 17 2958409 3.76 49 18 3134710 3.73 45 17 1554886 3.80 50 19 1243595 3.73 45 17 1378383 3.81 52 18 2999168 3.42 458 161 60913 4.19 172 48 865749 3.79 53 19 16797 3.68 1381 294 220 3.81 2332 392 2578 3.62 21726 2696 2731631 3.97 62 18 1406362 3.46 329 112 2009