In this bold, fascinating book, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear – fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what may be in your children’s air, food, mattresses, medicines, and vaccines. Reflecting on her own experience as a new mother, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. 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 an inoculation against our fear and a moving account of how we are all interconnected – our bodies and our fates.
Selected for Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook 'Year in Books' in February 2015 | Shortlisted for 2014 NBCC Awards |
Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year |
Time Out 10 Best Books of 2014
'Sontag said she wrote Illness as Metaphor to "calm the imagination, not to incite it," and On Immunity also seeks to cool and console. But where Sontag was imperious, Biss is stealthy. She advances from all sides, like a chess player, drawing on science, myth, literature to herd us to the only logical end, to vaccinate.'
--Parul Sehgal,
New York Times'On Immunity is brave because it will attract hostility from those she implies are selfish or misguided in refusing to vaccinate. Her arguments are profoundly compelling, and her narratives are braided together with beauty and elegance. The book is itself an inoculation- it grafts and unites different traditions of the essay, and in doing so creates something stronger and more resilient. And its urgent message is an inoculation against ignorance and fearmongering: may it spread out through the world, bringing substance and common sense to the vaccination debate. - Gavin Francis, Guardian
'On Immunity is as political as it is personal- Biss rails against a capitalism that has made unnatural individuals of us all- and as philosophical as it is political...What Biss does best, however, is doubt. She develops arguments and amasses detail but she also allows her writing to be shot through with uncertainty, Not often does a writer baldly admit that they don't know what something means (in this case, the ending of Candide).It is a very human non-fiction that emerges, comfortable with its questions.'
--Sophie Elmhirst,
Financial Times'Imagine Eula Biss as herself a vaccine against vague and incoherent thinking, as a booster to the acuity of your thought, as a thermometer taking the temperature of our ideas about purity, contagion, individuality, and community. This book is a magnificent piece of research and of writing.'- Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking
'Like so many great nonfiction classics, On Immunity will teach, provoke, chafe, inspire, haunt, and likely change its many readers. Its central, difficult, and ecstatic premise- that "we owe each other our bodies"- couldn't be more urgent, as the question of how we contend with this interdependence, this collectivity, is fundamental to our human present and future.' --Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
