....then yeah, I want to read it.

Notes From No Man's Land is an essay collection author Eula Biss that won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. (That is another clue that the book is a must read.) Here's what Alexie had to say in his blurb:

I fought with this book. I shouted, Amen! I cursed at it for being so wildly wrong and right. It's so smart, combative, surprising and sometimes shocking that it kept me twisting and turning in my seat like I was on some kind of sociopolitical roller coaster ride. Eula Biss writes with equal parts beauty and terror. I loved it.

I bought this one for myself because of Alexie's blurb and also because of excerpts I had read about her first essay, on telephone poles and the history of lynching in America. I used to heavily teach lynching to my students at Ft Wainwright, just because it shows so much about who we were - not only the fact that lynchings occurred, but that so many people celebrated them and that the largest mass lynching in the US was actually of Italians in New Orleans in 1891. The topic has a lot of punch and I found it was always excellent for finding common ground among all students (no one supports lynching). So I wanted to see what Biss could bring to this aspect of American history and man, was I ever impressed.

In "Time and Distance Overcome" she writes about the history of the telephone, the development of telephone poles (and how some people opposed them to the point of destruction) and how, by default, they became used for lynchings. She writes about riots, about lynching postcards, about a big story (lynchings) and a small one (telephone poles). She includes amazing things like this:

In Pittsburgh, Kansas, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole, cut down, burned, shot and stone with bricks. "At first the negro was defiant," the New York Times reported, "but just before he was hanged he begged hard for his life."

In the final paragraphs she mentions her grandfather who was a lineman whose back was broken when a pole fell. And just like that she gives you personal insight as to why the poles have always captivated her ("My Dad could raise a pole by himself," her father would say) and yet how she can not see them the same way now. It's a startling beginning and the book just takes off from there.

Biss gets personal by explaining her family's mixed race history and yet this is not a memoir but rather an occasional consideration of her experience. She writes about teaching but then uses that entry to discuss the mashup of attitudes (both preconceived and otherwise) in inner city schools. She writes about the Caucasian woman who gave birth to twins via invitro and one was African American (and not hers) and the outcome of that court case (and what it said about mothering) and about writing for the San Diego Voice and Viewpoint, an African American community newspaper.

I was especially impressed though with a historical essay about Buxton, Iowa. In "Back to Buxton", Biss writes about Buxton, "the Negro Athens of the Northwest" and her own experiences living in Iowa City, an often out of control college town. The security and peace found in Buxton, is absent from Biss's life and drives her to study not only its history but that of other towns who live on in the university's archives. For historians this is pure candy all by itself but when viewed through the author's lens one sees not only the way it was, but how it is now. We see how easy it is to see what we want to see, believe what we want to believe and ignore the truth. In other words, Biss finds that the Iowa of today is not nearly as racially diverse as it once was and in many the university is the perfect example of what has gone wrong in the decades since Buxton (and the largely Mexican-American town of Cook's Point).

"Buxton" is the mid point in the book and it is then that it becomes abundantly clear that Biss's carefully crafted words are partly about her, partly about New York City and California and Iowa and her family but mostly, overwhelming, about race in America. She doesn't hit you over the head, but you can't deny the words she presents - the way she shows the differences in how the media covered Katrina vs a tornado in Iowa six months later. The Iowa story is primarily of neighbors who helped neighbors yet Biss listens to her college students tell stories of bricks being thrown through liquor store windows and thirty cases of beer consumed in a parking lot. "Our willingness to believe the news," she writes, "is not entirely innocent."

Biss writes about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her own "pioneering" moments in a move to the Midwest. She writes about immigrants from Mexico and Ireland, about apologies to Japanese Americans and Native Americans and [not] African Americans. She pulls back the veneer of the American soul, strips our history bare, and demands that we look, really and truly look, at who we are. Sometimes she veers a bit off course with her own personal story and some essays are stronger than others but overall, as a collection, she achieves an enormous amount of power. Alexie is right - you will want to scream and shout when reading Notes From No Man's Land. There is quiet passion at work in this book; would that I could write this well.