Eula Biss

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.

An Inoculation

On Immunity

Terry Nguyen

Examines the pervasive fears and myths surrounding vaccines from a mother's perspective and identifies the historical and cultural factors that cause people to doubt government regulations and the medical establishment.

Great essays about the vaccine, anti-vax people, and pandemic (this was pre-COVID!). It's holistic, full of intriguing references, very well written, and super important!

Ali Angco

A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year, On Immunity by Eula Biss--now in paperback 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.

Ana Hein

3.75 Stars! One of those books that hides its craft and makes you go--"yeah that obvious" while still being totally brilliant at the same time. It only feels obvious because it is so well constructed--most of this would not have occurred to you on a given day. Biss mixes personal memoir of new motherhood with the medical history of vaccines and the complicated social history of them and they ways they influence other areas of our lives--our body politic, as she refers to it in the book. The language is a bit too direct for my personal taste, but I was never lost and I thought most of her conclusions/ponderings made sense, and I wish there were more memoir bits, but overall, I really admire Biss's sustained inquiry into a single topic and how much she was able to excavate on just one thoroughly researched idea. A book I admire more deeply on a craft/research level than for its personal enjoyment.

Imane

Edit 5/4/21 - changed the rating to 2.5 stars, reason at the end of the review

I am a bit perplexed by this book. The positives are: it's destigmatising, it addresses skeptics of vaccines in a constructive manner that is inviting rather than accusatory, it clarifies not only what vaccines are from a scientific perspective without resorting to jargon or über-scientific terms while also shedding light on what vaccines mean from a purely social perspective, and some of the metaphors used to talk about immunity (such as the warlike language to discuss immunity) and studied throughout this book are highly effective*, as are some others such as comparing capitalism to a vampiric system.

* I now realise that these effective metaphors were quoted or paraphrased from other authors/people so...

However, I think this book falls short in several aspects too. I usually like shorter chapters but this book could have benefited from uniting the central ideas of separate chapters into more cohesive and bigger chapters. This book is quite meandering and anecdotal, and I felt that the message was often lost in the turns the author took to reference back to an event or a conversation in her life that I found only tangentially relevant to the point raised in the specific chapter. A more concise authorial voice would have driven the point home much more effectively imo. Speaking of driving the point home, there is a jarring contrast between the wishy-washy parts of the book where the author seems almost frightful of calling a spade a spade (such as calling anti-vaxxers "vaccine activists"... what in the name of silly euphemisms?) while also sometimes showcasing the ability to actually seem a lot more convinced by the stances this book took. What I'm trying to say (while paraphrasing hbomberguy) is: this book frequently threatened to finally give us more and be convinced of itself and convincing too, but it was too worried and indecisive to achieve that, which is a shame given the topic at hand. Sometimes, being direct is good, and hand-wringing typically gets on my nerves so that's that on that. Finally, I found that the author's own metaphors were sometimes stretched too thin to accommodate the points raised in this book.

It's a rather mixed bag but I'd still recommend this book. An interesting note on the book is that Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor and Aids and Its Metaphors" is frequently quoted so I'm quite interested in getting to that work relatively soon, as I feel that the metaphors drawn in Sontag's work may be more effective than Biss's, whose extensive ramblings on vampirism as a metaphor for virus/plague/healthcare/modern medicine/anything else that was compared to Dracula didn't quite convince me.

However, I do think this book serves an interesting purpose and will work for a wide variety of people with varying opinions. If you are looking for something more science-driven than anecdotal, this book is not for you. However, if you like personal essays and themes such as motherhood, health and the place of individuals within a community, I think you'll like this book. At the end of the day I appreciate what this book managed to accomplish while also acknowledging that there are things that did quite work for me.

Edit: I just remembered that there was a worrisome passage on autism at the end of the book that struck me as ableist. The book did a great job up until that point to rebuke the popular theory about anti-vaxxers that vaccines caused autism but for some reason, the last leg of the book the author said this: "When my son was an infant, I feared autism, which seemed to be spreading like a plague, particularly among boys." I find this a rather shockingly ableist thing to say so.... yeah. Demoting it to a 2 star, this book could've been something interesting but it decided to be weird instead.

Emily C Peterson

Rachel

I read this for Mark Zuckerberg's book club, A Year Of Books. With all the drama with measles and whether or not to vaccinate your child this was a good read due to the times. I felt like a lot of the information was no shit Sherlock material, but then you remember how many people disagree with facts & statistics despite the research backing them. For example, side effects, the book makes it clear with data that vaccinations cannot be proven to cause autism. I liked how the book explained her immunity (if majority gets vaccinated the few who can't or their body doesn't react to the vaccination are safe because they are less likely to be exposed). I hadn't drawn that conclusion, but it makes perfect sense. I felt the book lacked details at times, it was a very shallow look into vaccinations focusing on the history and reasons why parents chose not to vaccinate and then debunking their reasoning. I get why it didn't go deep because the author was telling her findings when she was researching vaccinations for her newborn son and it is a concern parents have. The book was all over the place at times and the author's obsession with vampires was getting on my nerves. Overall a good book to introduce vaccination debate and the history, plus its a quick read with 160ish pages of content.

On Immunity An Inoculation

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