On Immunity
A meditation on vaccination, motherhood, and our bodies as commons, written in short numbered sections that function as individual essays building to a sustained argument. One of the finest works of scientific and political essay writing in English.
Biss built this from roughly thirty short, unnumbered sections rather than a chapter-by-chapter case for vaccination, and readers hunting for a fact-dense argument say the mood wins out over evidence. The Dracula material draws the sharpest complaint: one reader jokes she “practically mentions Dracula on every page” and never quite ties the vampire folklore back to the shot itself. Her own postpartum blood transfusion gets so much space that one reviewer says “the book should have been called Transfusion” instead. The organization frustrates other readers too, who call it “bounced from topic to topic without any structure” and “as focused as a broken telescope,” with substantive material stranded in endnotes the main text never flags. A late passage tying childhood illness to autism strikes at least one reader as a real lapse in an otherwise careful book.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
