Review by Choice Review
The thread that forms this book's narrative deals with Biss (artist in residence, Northwestern Univ.; Notes from No Man's Land, 2009) deciding whether or not her son should be vaccinated at generally prescribed times. Her prose and imagery make easy reading; it is obvious that she is a good storyteller. On this basis, however, a better descriptive title for the book would be "On Vaccination," rather than On Immunity, which suggests a scientific tone. The short chapters relate a variety of subjects to vaccination. Readers meet Achilles, Dracula, Narcissus, Kierkegaard, Voltaire, Karl Marx, Rachel Carson, and Susan Sontag, along with numerous others identified as "the immunologist," "the philosopher of science," "the literary critic," etc. In addition, the author covers such wide-ranging topics as diversity, tolerance, capitalism, DDT, thimerosal, and AIDS. Notes, mostly lengthy, occupy 21 pages; the book also includes a list of selected sources. Mythology appears to be a mild obsession with Biss. Though the author is not a scientist, a pretense of science pervades the text. A firm conclusion is lacking, giving no direction to what one should learn from the reading. There are no new insights. Summing Up: Optional. General readers. --Richard S. Kowalczyk, formerly, University of Michigan
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
LUCRETIUS SAID TO handle them with caution; Berkeley, not to handle them at all. Aristotle said that too many confound; Locke, that even one can "mislead the judgment"; Hobbes, that their natural end was "contention and sedition, or contempt." Sontag said simply, they kill. Pity the poor metaphor, so maligned, so alluring. We've been warned repeatedly - and, inevitably, in metaphors - that metaphors can do terrible things. (According to Sontag, the grotesque metaphors attached to AIDS and cancer contributed to their stigma and prevented people from seeking treatment.) And yet, it's impossible to go without. Supposedly, we use one metaphor a minute, about one metaphor for every 25 words; we seem scarcely able to string together two thoughts without them (there goes one), they cast such clarifying, necessary light (and another). The essayist Eula Biss is something of a specialist at handling our twitchiest, most combustible metaphors. In her 2009 collection, "Notes From No Man's Land," she picked apart the metaphors we've used to construct and report on race in America. In her new book, the subtle, spellbinding "On Immunity," she goes under the skin. She asks why vaccination triggers such anxiety - anxiety so intense it lives in the language: The British call it a "jab," Americans, a "shot." "The metaphors we find in this gesture are overwhelmingly fearful, and almost always suggest violation, corruption and pollution," she writes. And though vaccine production is one of our more rigorously regulated industries, vaccines have been blamed for causing everything from allergies to autism. Even though the scientific literature cited by the anti-vaccination movement has been repeatedly debunked, American children - particularly those of white, wealthy, educated parents - are going unvaccinated in increasing numbers, with the predictable consequences. There have been recent outbreaks of mumps and whooping cough. Measles, which had all but disappeared in America, made a major resurgence this year. Biss doesn't linger on the outbreaks, nor does she refer to an "anti-vaccination movement." She speaks only of "mothers." This book, she tells us, was born out of conversations she had with other mothers while expecting her first child, conversations that complicated her ideas of vaccination and introduced her to a vocabulary of dread. She was warned about potential contaminants - "the frickin' mercury, the ether, the aluminum, the antifreeze," in the words of the actress Jenny McCarthy, a vocal critic of vaccination. But Biss realized that what was troubling about vaccines wasn't what was in them (not least because she says there's nothing toxic to be found), but the fog of fear surrounding them, how strenuously these mothers insisted that vaccines were dangerous even when presented with evidence to the contrary. "Our fears are dear to us," she writes, and she parses these fears with kindness and complicity. After all, she says, she matches the profile of the kind of woman inclined to be suspicious of vaccines - white, educated, relatively wealthy - a woman drawn to doing things "naturally," who tells us she gave birth without pain medication, medical intervention or an IV. That "naturally" is key. Our anxieties about industrialization, at how we've polluted the world and presumably each other, have given the word its particular luster: "Where the word filth once suggested, with its moralist air, the evils of the flesh, the word toxic now condemns the chemical evils of our industrial world." Biss reports from deep inside the panic. "My son's birth brought with it an exaggerated sense of both my own power and my own powerlessness," she writes. The world became suddenly forbidding: There is the lead paint in the wall to fear, the hexavalent chromium in the water. Even stagnant air, she was told, can kill her child. "It is both a luxury and a hazard to feel threatened by the invisible," she says. "In Chicago, where 677 children were shot the year after my son was born, I still somehow manage to find myself more captivated by less tangible threats." Weaning proved especially excruciating. "As long as a child takes only breast milk, I discovered, one can enjoy the illusion of a closed system, a body that is not yet in dialogue with the impurities of farm and factory," she writes. "I remember feeling agony when my son drank water for the first time. 'Unclean! Unclean!' my mind screamed." We do love to pit the sacred against the profane, but breast milk, it turns out, contains traces of paint thinners, flame-retardants, even rocket fuel. If it were sold in stores, some samples would exceed federal food-safety levels for pesticides. "We are all already polluted," Biss learns. "We are crawling with bacteria and we are full of chemicals. We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other." 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. To refuse is to fall in love with our fears, to create a fantasy of our purity and vulnerability and forget all the ways we are dangerous. She writes of one mother resistant to vaccination to whom it had never occurred that her child might be strong enough to fight off a virus but might pass it on to someone more vulnerable - a baby, an elderly or sick person - who couldn't. Vaccines were meant to enlist a "majority in the protection of a minority," Biss writes. Today, "a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent." "ON IMMUNITY" CONCLUDES by inviting us to relinquish illusions of the body's independence and acknowledge our participation in a web of interdependency. This isn't a treacly take on "community," though. It's the blunt reality of blood banks and organ donors. Biss reminds us that we owe each other our lives. But her realization that "from birth onward, our bodies are a shared space" posits a question. Didn't "Notes From No Man's Land," open with the words "We are all connected, all of us"? Did she feel compelled to create a narrator for "On Immunity" who is more naïve than we know her to be? I suspect it's more complicated - not a restatement of a theme but a deepening. The idea that all bodies are continuous is greatly important to Biss; she even plays with it textually, with one book leaking into another and the delayed attribution of quotations challenging our notions about what is native to the book and what is foreign. What she seems to be suggesting is that knowledge isn't an inoculation. It doesn't happen just once. There are things that must be learned and learned again, seen first with the mind and felt later in the body. Biss's "natural" delivery went wrong. After the baby was born, her uterus inverted, and she was taken immediately into surgery. "Alarms were sounded for me, doctors rushed to me, bags of blood were rigged for me," she writes. "During the birth, when the violence to my body was the greatest, I was most aware not of the ugliness of a body's dependence on other bodies, but of the beauty of it." When she wakes, shivering, tethered to IV bags of antibiotics, she's told: "You've had a lot of people's hands in you." No metaphors necessary. PARUL SEHGAL is an editor at The Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 28, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her elegant, book-length essay, Biss (Notes from No Man's Land, 2009) inoculates readers against the misinformation and paranoia surrounding vaccinations. The daughter of a doctor and the mother of a young son who is fully vaccinated, Biss carefully measures current knowledge of disease along with what remains unknown about immunization. She concludes that the benefit of vaccination to individuals and communities is much greater than any harm. Yet some people view immunization as a violent act, an attack on bodily purity. Biss writes, A needle breaks the skin, a sight so profound that it causes some people to faint, and a foreign substance is injected directly into the flesh. The metaphors we find in this gesture are overwhelmingly fearful, and almost always suggest violation, corruption, and pollution. Indeed, vaccinations are dubbed shots. Her far-reaching and unusual investigation into immunity includes a discussion of the chemicals thimerosal and triclosan, Dracula, measles and smallpox, the hygiene hypothesis, herd immunity, Achilles and Voltaire, altruism, and the appeal of alternative medicine. Artfully mixing motherhood, myth, maladies, and metaphors into her presentation, Biss transcends medical science and trepidation.--Miksanek, Tony Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Matt McGowan, Frances Goldin Literary Agency. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
National Book Critics Circle Award winner Biss (Notes from No Mans Land,2009) investigates the nature of vaccinations, from immunity as myth to the intricate web of the immune system.The fears surrounding vaccines are not late-breaking news, as the author notes in this literate, rangy foray into the history and consequences of vaccination. In the 18th centuryand frankly, little less todayit was understandable to associate vaccination with the work of witches: The ideathat pus from a sick cow can be scraped into a wound on a person and make that person immune to a deadly disease is almost as hard to believe now as it was in 1796. Indeed, the idea of poking yourself with a dose of virulent organisms to save yourself from them is not an intuitive leap. Biss ably tracks the progress of immunization: as metaphorthe protective impulse to make our children invulnerable (Achilles, Oedipus); as theory and science (the author provides a superb explanation of herd immunity: when enough people are vaccinated with even a relatively ineffective vaccine, viruses have trouble moving from host to host and cease to spread); as a cash cow for big pharma; and as a class issuethe notion of the innocent and the pure being violated by vaccinations, that people without good living standards need vaccines, whereas vaccines would only clog up the more refined systems of middle-class and upper-class people. Biss also administers a thoughtful, withering critique to more recent fears of vaccinesthe toxins they carry, from mercury to formaldehyde, and accusations of their role in causing autism. The author keeps the debate lively and surprising, touching on Rachel Carson here and Dr. Bob there. She also includes her fathers wise counsel, which accommodates the many sides of the topic but arrives at a clear point of view: Vaccinate.Brightly informative, giving readers a sturdy platform from which to conduct their own research and take personal responsibility. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
