REVIEWS

“This book is a beautiful exercise in consciousness; in bringing both intelligence and experience to bear on a subject that has implications for the way one behaves in the world.”

 

“Biss’s pairings of ideas, like those of most original thinkers, have the knack of seeming brilliant and obvious at the same time. The book’s first essay, ‘Time and Distance Overcome,’ intersperses brief fragments on the creation of our country’s network of telephone poles with the history of another American innovation: lynching.” [Link]

 

“Biss moves through language like a spider spinning a web, delicately linking telephone poles and lynch mobs, Laura Ingalls Wilder's ‘Little House’ books and Biss’s own Rogers Park neighborhood. Biss writes like a poet, evoking images with a cool passion, and she plays with ideas on the page and challenges readers to work out their own rhythms.” [Link]

 

“Biss is up to something else, something wonderfully mature, intelligent, and new. In these essays, Biss reexamines not only her own history but that of her country, revealing in both delicate, poetic prose and blunt, necessarily emotionless journalism the truths, both painful and triumphant, of the American experiment.” [Link]

 

"Biss calls our attention to things so intrinsic to our lives they have become invisible, such as telephone poles and our assumptions about race…. With nods to Didion and Baldwin, her sinuous essays dart off and zigzag, and we hold on tight. Biss compares the lesson plans for freed slaves in Reconstruction-era public schools with what is taught to today's African American students, and chronicles her experiences as a minority in black worlds, including her stint as a reporter for an African American community newspaper in San Diego. 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."

 

“An intense, sensitive author and journalist with a restless spirit and a whip-crack wit, Biss (The Balloonists) presents a collection of short essays on race in America that spans an impressive range, beginning with a gripping narrative connecting the history of the telephone pole with the history of lynching. As her stories progress, Biss extrapolates a great deal about America's complicated racial attitudes from her own experience—teaching in Harlem, living in a diverse Chicago neighborhood, watching the long, sad saga of Hurricane Katrina from Iowa. The result is a personal, opinionated and accessible collection; Americans of any background, while they may disagree with her point of view, will see a country they recognize in settings as diverse as deepest Brooklyn or a Mexican border retreat.” [Link]

 

“The concluding essay in the collection is called ‘All Apologies.’ It’s a series of apologies (and non-apologies) issued throughout history…. At the end of the essay, Biss writes, ‘I apologize for slavery.’ It’s less an admission of wrongdoing than a classic apologia—a formal defense, and implicit examination, of her own conduct, which is what underpins this entire book. The reader is once again reminded of those telephone poles at the turn of the twentieth century, which served as both gallows and technological thruway. That nexus implicates all of us, and Biss puts it in plain view: for a moment, at least, we see even what is unseen.” [Link]

 

“Biss’s examination of America’s complicated racial heritage offers penetrating insight. In ‘Back to Buxton,’ she contrasts the supposedly progressive university in Iowa City, where white and black students rarely cross paths, with the early-20th-century hamlet of Buxton, a small, Jim Crow–era town that functioned, briefly, as a desegregated utopia…. 'Is this Kansas?,' in particular, raises some troubling questions about the way the young are trained to view tragedies like Katrina—often through the harsh lens of racial stereotypes. Telephone poles may be on their way out, but at moments like these, Biss still encourages us to reach out and connect.” [Link]

 

“Biss’s undertaking, then, is to lead us into no man’s land by uncovering how we’re already there. Drawing upon stories from the media, historical records, sociological research, and her own keenly observed experiences, she demonstrates how the legacy of racism has left the U.S. a kind of disputed ground, a place of confusion where whites and blacks may find belonging within their own racial groups but struggle to belong together as Americans.”

 

“I can hardly speak of this book, honestly: it’s heartrendingly amazing and so completely/complexly itself that the idea of trying to encapsulate it’s laughable. What it is, for sure, is this: it’s Eula Biss wondering about and poring over and looping back on/through ideas about race and self and home and America. I know that that process—someone at the wheel, driving into the big dark map of self/race/America—is only fully magnificent in the hands/words of a few artists, but let’s here be totally clear that Eula Biss is one of those artists, someone whose work, if made mandatory consumption for the country, would enrich and enlarge each of us to a point of fullness that’s almost scary.” [Link]

 

“Biss’s essays read like constellations; she sets her stars in place to refract a picture far brighter than any individual star. But Biss’s most successful accomplishment isn’t her framework, but her ability to transition from the innocent to the reproachable without revealing the intricacies of her sleight of hand.”

 

“Blending contemporary racial theory with historical examples such as the 1939 Clark ‘doll studies’ (which revealed the disheartening ethnic biases of young children), Biss displays an impressive depth of knowledge as well as feeling.”