On Immunity: An Inoculation
Eula Bliss, 2014
Graywolf Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781555977207
Summary
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. (From publishers.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1977-78
• Raised—upstate New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Hampshire College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award; Pushcart Prize; Carl Sandberg Award
• Currently—lives in Evanston, Illinois
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer and the founder of Essay Press where she is also an editor. She teaches, as an artist in residence, at Northwestern University.
Personal
Rasied in upstate New York, Biss earned a bachelor's degree in non-fiction writing from Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. After graduation, she moved to New York City, teaching in public schools—an experience that profoundly influenced her writing. In 2003, she moved to Iowa City to complete her MFA in the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. She teaches at Northwestern University.
She and her husband John Bresland live with their son in Evanston, Illinois. She and Bresland are also in a band called STET Everything.
Writing
Biss published her first book Balloonist, a collection of prose poems, in 2002. Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays, her second book, came out in 2009, winning the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She published her third book On Immunity: An Inoculation in 2014. It was named one of the New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2014" and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Biss won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/20/2015.)
Book Reviews
On Immunity casts a spell.... There's drama in watching this smart writer feel her way through this material. She's a poet, an essayist and a class spy. She digs honestly into her own psyche and into those of "people like me," and she reveals herself as believer and apostate, moth and flame.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Subtle, spellbinding.... Sontag said she wrote Illness as Metaphor to "calm the imagination, not to incite it," and On Immunity also seeks to cool and console...[Biss] 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 Book Review
A welcome antidote--or "inoculation," as the subtitle suggests--against the toxic shouting match occurring between 'anti-vaxxers' and their opponents.... Biss leaps nimbly through a vertiginous range of subjects.... Brilliant and entertaining.
Boston Globe
A philosophical look at the history and practice of vaccination that reads like Joan Didion at her best. If you are yourself a nonfiction author, your initial response to this book might be to decide immediately on another line of work; Biss is that intimidatingly talented.... This is cultural commentary at its highest level, a searching examination of the most profound issues of health, identity and the tensions between individual parenting decisions and society.
Washington Post
By exploring the anxieties about what's lurking inside our flu shots, the air, and ourselves, [Biss] drives home the message that we are all responsible for one another. On Immunity will make you consider that idea on a fairly profound level.
Entertainment Weekly
On Immunity...weaves metaphor and myth, science and sociology, philosophy and politics into a tapestry rich with insight and intelligence.
Jerome Groopman - New York Review of Books
[An] elegant, intelligent and very beautiful book, which occupies a space between research and reflection, investigating our attitudes toward immunity and inoculation through a personal and cultural lens.
Los Angeles Times
Biss's gracious rhetoric and her insistence that she feels "uncomfortable with both sides" of the rancorous fight may frustrate readers looking for a pro-vaccine polemic. Yet her approach might actually be more likely to sway fearful parents, offering them an alternative set of images and associations to use in thinking about immunization.... Compelling.... This is writing designed to conquer anxiety.
The New Yorker
Biss advocates eloquently for childhood immunization...and understanding the consequences. Her exploration is both historical and emotional.... Biss frankly and optimistically looks at our "unkempt" world and our shared mission to protect one another.
Publishers Weekly
[A] far-reaching and unusual investigation into immunity.... Artfully mixing motherhood, myth, maladies, and metaphors into her presentation, Biss transcends medical science and trepidation
Booklist
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Biss investigates the nature of vaccinations, from immunity as myth to the intricate web of the immune system.... Brightly informative, giving readers a sturdy platform from which to conduct their own research and take personal responsibility.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for On Immunity:
1. One of the big questions dealt with in Biss's On Immunity is why vaccinations trigger fear and dread in many. To what does the author attribute this anxiety?
2. The author writes, "My son’s birth brought with it an exaggerated sense of both my own power and my own powerlessness. The world became suddenly forbidding." What specifically does Biss fear? Do you relate to those concerns--or do you feel they're an over-exaggeration?
3. What are your personal views on childhood vaccinations? Does Biss make a convincing case—logically, morally, and/or scientifically—in support of vaccinating infants and children? If so, what did you find most convincing?
—> On the other hand, if you remain unconvinced about the safety and efficacy of childhood vaccines, in what way did Biss fail to convince you? Where do you disagree with her? Better yet, where does her evidence fall short?
4. Much has been made of Biss's conciliatory language and the overall tone she uses throughout the book. Reviewers speak of her kindness, calmness, even her complicity as a mother. Point to some of the words and phrases she uses to de-escalate the potential for anger.
5. Bliss writes that "a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent." What does she mean by that?
6. Biss believes that "from birth onward, our bodies are a shared space." Do you agree...or not? Either way, where do our responsibilities lie—for ourselves, as well as for others?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)