Furthermore, Biss’s writing, however confident, is filled with its own anxiety-Biss, like Baldwin, comes off as uneasy about the subject of race, finding that no matter how well traveled or studied, it’s a complicated and multifaceted subject to report on. Baldwin gave us field notes from Harlem and the streets of Paris Biss similarly divides her book geographically, into five sections labeled “Before,” “New York,” “California,” “The Midwest,” and “After.” More than just geographic distinctions, however, is Baldwin’s relaxed but sharp execution in his writing and its replication in Biss’s prose. Like Baldwin, Biss puts the subject of race at the core of her writing, and, like Baldwin, ties it strongly to geography.

To Polito’s list, I’d add Maggie Nelson, Hilton Als, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Sarah Manguso, but I agree most strongly with his inclusion of James Baldwin in his list, as Notes from No Man’s Land is strongly reminiscent of Notes of a Native Son. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what.“Biss writes essays,” Robert Polito writes in the Judge’s Afterword of Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays, “the way Plutarch and Montaigne did-or if this sounds too classic for her passionate cool, also think James Baldwin, Anne Carson, Jenny Boully, and Luc Sante” (Polito 230). In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Nicknamed the Suffragettes' Hospital, Endell Street soon became known for its lifesaving treatments. Although, prior to the war and the Spanish flu, female doctors were restricted to treating women and children, Flora and Louisa's work was so successful that the British Army asked them to set up a hospital in the heart of London.

The 'absorbing and powerful' ( Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I.Ī month after war broke out in 1914, doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson set out for Paris, where they opened a hospital in a luxury hotel and treated hundreds of casualties plucked from France's battlefields.

No Man's Land by Wendy Moore