On Immunity
An Inoculation
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
When Eula Biss became a mother, she stepped into a new world of fear: fear of the government, the medical establishment, the contents of her child's air, food, mattress and vaccines.
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. Weaving her personal experiences with an exploration of classical and contemporary literature, Biss considers what vaccines, and the debate around them, mean for her own child, her immediate community and the wider world.
On Immunity is an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected; our bodies and our fates.
Eula Biss is the author of Notes from No Man’s Land, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and The Balloonists. Her essays have appeared in the Believer and Harper’s Magazine. She teaches at Northwestern University and lives in Chicago.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biss (Notes from No Man's Land) advocates eloquently for childhood immunization, making her case as an anxious new mother intent on protecting her son and understanding the consequences. Her exploration is both historical and emotional, and she receives some metaphorical guidance from Bram Stoker's Dracula, a story that to Biss invites an "enduring question do we believe vaccination to be more monstrous than disease?" Her son's birth coincided with an outbreak of the H1N1 flu (popularly known as "swine flu"), triggering an inquiry that involved her doctor father, other mothers, researchers, and her own copious research. Biss's study ranges from the beginnings of vaccination a "precursor to modern medicine" in the 1700s, through Andrew Wakefield's disastrous, and later retracted, 1998 study that proposed the MMR vaccine might be linked to autism. Protecting her baby set off an "intuitive toxicology," Biss writes, but grew to understand that we harbor "more microorganisms in our guts than we have cells in our bodies." She comes down hard on Robert Sears, author of The Vaccine Book, which suggests an alternate shots schedule, for his "equivocal" conclusions, and defends oft-criticized pediatrician Paul Offit for his research and integrity. Biss frankly and optimistically looks at our "unkempt" world and our shared mission to protect one another.
