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A review by samwreads
Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays by Eula Biss
4.0
Essays suffused with confusion and anger.
Biss does a good job of taking injustices playing out on the national or international scale and bringing them back to a very personal level.
That said, I personally liked the two essays without a distinct narrative arc the best - the ones on telephone poles and on apologies. Their economy of language and concise paragraphs really distilled the emotional and logical content, while letting the message build more like a poem than a traditional essay.
Overall I do think that the essays in this book serve more as an introduction to challenging topics rather than say things I found distinctly new. But they do this well and the anecdotes, while often sad and frustrating, are also humorous in a darkly entertaining way.
Biss does a good job of taking injustices playing out on the national or international scale and bringing them back to a very personal level.
That said, I personally liked the two essays without a distinct narrative arc the best - the ones on telephone poles and on apologies. Their economy of language and concise paragraphs really distilled the emotional and logical content, while letting the message build more like a poem than a traditional essay.
Overall I do think that the essays in this book serve more as an introduction to challenging topics rather than say things I found distinctly new. But they do this well and the anecdotes, while often sad and frustrating, are also humorous in a darkly entertaining way.