On Immunity: An Inoculation

By Eula Biss

Book Overview

"On Immunity is a book I've recommended too many times to count--a searching, empathetic, ultimately unassailable argument, not just for vaccination but for thoroughly acknowledging our interdependence, and for all that becomes necessary and possible once we do. Written before COVID, it nonetheless speaks directly to the concerns of the pandemic era--to the fact that we are dangerous as well as vulnerable, to the way collective well-being and individual self-interest are configured at odds to one another when they are fundamentally intertwined."--Jia Tolentino

In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses our fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in our children's air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, she suggests that we cannot immunize our children, or ourselves, against the world. As she explores the metaphors surrounding immunity, Biss extends her conversations with other mothers to meditations on the myth of Achilles, Voltaire's Candide, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555977200
• ISBN13: 9781555977207
• Release Date: September 2015
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Timely as hell, its final virtue

I turned a page 4/5 the way in, expecting another chapter, but it was over! Just the way this author formats her endnotes encourages us to savor the whole beautiful book again. Not chapter by chapter, but page by mind-expanding page. On immunity gets to the heart of humanity (via vaccination). Eula Biss has a genius, very evident in her 2008 Notes from No Man's Land, for drawing upon her personal experience – here pregnancy, giving birth, raising a child with seriously challenging allergies -- to illuminate larger medical, social, quasi-political -- and historical and philosophical issues -- very critical even to global human well-being. She is a master of inflating the balloons of our prejudices and blisters of personal certainties, then pricking them with a needle of deep research, science, and good sense. She grapples with such broad issues as individuality and self only to bring us insights that surprise and, sometimes, shake us. We come away from this read with a profounder realization of our strong yet fragile web of interdependence. But it is the means she employs in bringing us along that is breathtaking. And, deeply satisfying. I almost forgot to mention An Inoculation is timely as if it had been written with the Covid pandemic in mind!