On Immunity: An Inoculation

by Eula Biss

Book Overview

A New York Times Best Seller
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year
A Facebook "Year of Books" Selection

One of the Best Books of the Year
* National Book Critics Circle Award finalist * The New York Times Book Review (Top 10) * Entertainment Weekly (Top 10) * New York Magazine (Top 10)* Chicago Tribune (Top 10) * Publishers Weekly (Top 10) * Time Out New York (Top 10) * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Booklist * NPR's Science Friday * Newsday * Slate * Refinery 29 * And many more...

Why do we fear vaccines? A provocative examination by Eula Biss, the author of Notes from No Man's Land, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear-fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in your child's air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world.
In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate community, America, and the world, both historically and in the present moment. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire's Candide, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1555976891
• ISBN13: 9781555976897
• Release Date: September 2014
• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.8"

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!