Lisa Lee recently completed her MFA in nonfiction at the University of Houston. She was the recipient of an Inprint/Barthelme Fellowship in Fiction for 2008, runner-up for the Inprint/Diana P. Hobby Prize in Fiction for 2009, and runner-up for the Inprint/Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Nonfiction for 2009. Lisa’s work has appeared in The Tusculum Review, Pebble Lake Review, and Reed Magazine. She is the former nonfiction editor of Gulf Coast. Time and Distance Overcome           Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land Lisa Lee           Eula Biss, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays.                Graywolf Press, 2009. Paperback, 230 pp, $15.00.        Eula Biss’s second book, Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (winner of the 2008 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize) ends with an essay on apology. She discusses how far apology goes and doesn’t go, what it can do and doesn’t do to remedy wrongs, how the crimes of the past can’t be washed out because some actions are irrevocable and unspeakable. She examines also how some people feel compelled to apologize, how some are taught not to apologize, and how sometimes public apologies can have legal consequences. When President Clinton asked an advisory group whether or not he should apologize for slavery, it was decided he should not. While in Africa Clinton instead expressed “regret” for U.S. participation in slavery, for U.S. support of dictators during the cold war, for U.S. neglect and ignorance of Africa, for the failure of the U.S. to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, and for U.S. complicity in apartheid. Biss suggests that in order to figure out what we can do now, as we live in the aftermath of slavery, lynching, internment camps, massacred Native Americans, and other offenses that have been calamitous to individuals, groups, or nations, we must first acknowledge how the past leaves a mark on our lives today.        Biss’s own apology in the final lines is what makes me like this book, and what makes it meaningful and important. It’s when she takes responsibility for the atrocious crimes of the past even though she is guilty of nothing, hoping that enough time has passed that this gesture will be received. It’s knowing that she is patiently waiting for the apology to be accepted. The book is good and likeable long before the last essay, and it is easy to admire the technique and be enthralled by the interesting history she digs up. But it’s what Biss finally does at the end—the apology that is important and necessary—that makes me appreciate the book for something more than good literature, for the act of a generous person who is trying to create change. Biss suggests that an apology, now, offered by our generation, is how we will begin.        The first essay is written in a fragmented collage, beginning with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone in 1876 and the impossible idea that we are all connected by a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart. Biss then moves on to the early war on telephone poles—people were sawing them down, defending their sidewalks with rifles, and threatening to tar and feather telephone company workers putting up the poles. The complaint was that the telephone poles were “an urban blight,” and, of course, there was the American concern for private property and a reluctance to surrender it for a shared utility. Despite the war on telephone poles, by the turn of the century, there were more telephones than bathtubs in America. “Time and dist. overcome,” read an early advertisement for the telephone. Here Biss shifts to lynchings in the South, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, with images of black men who were hanged from telephone poles and sometimes cut down while half-alive, burned, shot, and stoned, for crimes such as unpopularity, whistling, disputing with a white man, or proposing marriage to a white woman. Biss writes:               The poles, of course, were not to blame. It was only               coincidence that they became convenient as gallows,               because they were tall and straight, with a crossbar,               and because they stood in public places. And it was               only coincidence that the telephone poles so closely               resembled crucifixes. Here we arrive at the theme of this collection of essays: race and America. Biss is an observer and devoted explorer of race, who inspects her insights carefully and with self-skepticism.        Part history, part autobiography, Biss’s essays are grouped into three geographical territories—New York, California (including Mexico), and the Midwest. As she sweeps through American life, she arrives at understanding by introducing salient subjects, then focusing on contrasts and parallels. In “Relations,” a couple in New York gives birth to black and white “twins” because of a fertility clinic’s mistake. The black child’s biological parents want him, the white parents won’t give him up, and there’s a custody battle. Interwoven with this story are fragments of Biss’s personal experience and other related history—the black doll she had as a child, the topsy-turvy doll, Mattel’s “Colored Francie” doll and “Oreo Fun Barbie,” posing for her mother’s African mask sculptures, sharing a Brooklyn apartment with her biracial cousin, “passing” (as white, as black), the Clarks’ doll studies, feeling trapped in her identity as a white woman while accepting the concurrent privileges, white American youth and the attempt to undo access to privilege through a modification of clothing, body, hair or skin.           Biss finds herself continually situated on the periphery of the experiences she investigates. She didn’t participate in the New York of the collective imagination, that mostly fictitious city; the New York she loved was “the city that existed on the margins of the story.” She tells us that going to the beach in San Diego is like going to Wall Street in New York—a center of elite commerce and a place where the city’s imagination of itself resides. Biss writes: “I would begin to understand that the city of San Diego imagines its beaches white by telling itself the same story over and over.” Biss did not live near the beach. She was hired by an African American community newspaper as a reporter and photographer where she “covered a San Diego that did not appear in the travel brochures.” In “Letter to Mexico,” she writes about NAFTA, about discovering the price of having lived a comfortable life and feeling crushing remorse, about American expatriates fleeing to Mexico for the life they’ve been promised but not delivered, about the sensation of being hated. She writes also about Iowa, Kansas, and Chicago, similarly from the standpoint of someone on the periphery, writing about existing on the margins, and the stories that exist on the margins.        But Biss’s essays are never self-congratulatory, and always self-doubtful. In a story told parallel to an analysis of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, Biss tells us that she rented a condo with her husband in Rogers Park in Chicago, which they never would have been able to afford except that the neighborhood is known for gang activity. Some neighbors hope the community will gentrify and deliver speeches dense with code: “pioneering neighborhood,” we need “more people like you,” other “people like us” will “lift it up.” Biss writes:               The word “pioneer” betrays a disturbing willingness               to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the               American West—the mistake of considering an               inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself               as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as               Chicago is either to deny the existence of your               neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be               displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.        The book ends with symmetry. Biss’s final apology in the last lines and the hope of what that might accomplish parallels the ending of the first essay. The telephone poles—those same poles which were once instruments of lynch mobs—can now represent, with the sprouting of small leafy branches, a symbol of life.