Eula BissRecensioni

This book is about the author's discomfort with being middle class *and* how nice and comfortable it is to be middle class. There's something wrong with "earning" money by investing in the stock market, but there's something so right about being able to retire and just write.

In this book, she talks about buying a house, furnishing it, and her job at a big university. There are lots of pop culture explorations including Scooby-doo and Rihanna. She includes some discussion of systemic racism, but this book is mainly about her personal experience as a white woman writer with lots of references to other white women writers like Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson and her friends who are poets and artists.

It feels like Eula Biss and I have enough in common that I find her perspective compelling. I loved her book about vaccination. I didn't like this one as much, but it still gave me a lot to ponder.

I have a big book crush on Eula Biss now. This book is deep without being difficult. I found it super thought-provoking, especially her thoughts on sympathizing with anti-vax feelings. I admit to harshly judging anti-vaxxers, but it is not totally irrational to fear/distrust the establishment. There is a lot to chew on in terms of who we trust and why.

She is less sympathetic to individualism/exceptionalism. One of my favorite sections from the book is: "I do not need to consult an ethicist to determine that there is something wrong [with making a special exemption just for yourself]." She points out that when we give blood, we are doing it for others, not for ourselves. Getting vaccinated should be seen in this same light.

This was published in 2014 and it's still very relevant in 2021 in the midst of COVID vaccinations.

This is also a book that felt deeply relevant to me as the parent of a young child. The fear/anxiety of parenting in the 21st century is almost unbearable to me sometimes. It felt good to read someone as smart as Biss struggle with the same issues and parse their origins. There's a great section on how many parents value "purity" and cleanliness and things that are "natural" in parenting. Our fears are often out of whack with the actual risks.

This is also a book about the "us versus them" mentality both in terms of how we related to germs/viruses (are they foreign invaders or are they part of us?) and how we relate to other humans (do we blame disease on those perceived as other or different?). Metaphors and analogies matter.

An exceptionally well-crafted example of NPR propaganda. Very creepy now, in the aftermath of the COVID-related executive orders that drove millions of people out of their jobs.

What makes it peak NPR? A few examples are: 1) the air of sweet reasonableness with which the author does not bother to accuse but simply asserts that her erstwhile pediatrician is a racist, 2) the determined innumeracy with which she examines the phrase "herd immunity", 3) the endless stories of her trials and tribulations around the allergies and illnesses of her unfortunate son, 4) the frequent misuse of "we" to mean all-readers-of-the-book rather than what it really means, which is I-and-all-my-friends-who-think-exactly-like-me, 5) the way every pharmaceutical-which-is-called-a-vaccine administered must be described as a "life saved" regardless of whether or not the child so treated was, e.g., eaten by a leopard on the way home. Etc.

On the other hand, she has a good vocabulary and when she abuses that vocabulary, e.g., using "conflate" to mean make-an-analogy-with, she does so with intent.

I've read a lot of writings by doctors, scientists, and skeptical activists about the misinformation on and public resistance to vaccines, and while many of them are excellent at laying out the facts on the subject, I often come away from them with the sense that they may, by and large, be preaching to the choir, or even taking an approach likely to alienate those most in need of their message.

But then there's this. The best description I can put forward for On Immunity is that it's a book about vaccines aimed at liberal humanities majors, written by one of their own. Which I think might sound like a criticism to some, but it is emphatically not. Eula Biss may be more of a poet than a scientist, but she has very thoroughly done her research here -- and not in the shallow, self-confirming sense that far too many people mean when they brag about "doing their own research" -- and she understands the facts and the science commendably well. But she also understands the emotions that real people feel when it comes to their bodies, their societies, and their children, as well as the metaphors we use to think about these things and the effects that those have on us. And she is anything but dismissive of these emotions and instincts and ways of thinking, even as she recognizes where they can fail. Through it all, she draws upon her own deeply personal experiences as a mother, sharing her profound feelings for her child and struggling with her uncertainties about what is best for him. She does all of this eloquently, thoughtfully, and movingly, and, perhaps, in a way that might reach those who find appeals to cold, hard rationality alone to be lacking something important to them.

This was originally published in 2014, and revolves, in part, around the H1N1 epidemic that was ongoing when her son was born, and which first prompted many of her fears and interests around the subjects of immunity and vaccines. But it has only become incredibly more relevant since. I'm only sorry I didn't read it a couple of years ago, so I could have gone around recommending it everywhere then.½

This book is a collection of essays from the author's perspective as a doctor's daughter and a mother. It informs the reader about immunity, viruses, history of some diseases, clinical trials and vaccination. It also explains the concept of herd immunity and the process involved in finding a vaccine for a disease. I found this book very relevant to the current crisis of coronavirus.

This book does not focus only on hard science. It sheds light on how healthcare impacts, as well as gets impacted by politics, economics, morality and prejudice. It was interesting to read about how the metaphors we use to describe disease and immunity can influence our thought process about health.

I liked how the author referenced books by professionals to back up her claims and occasionally quoted fiction or recounted her own experience when she focussed on philosophical grey areas.

I have a good feeling about these essays, but cannot remember details.

Pleasant, anti-consumerist, woke musings of young-ish mom. She's trying to do things right, but finds herself sucked into various modern consumerist traps (familiar?). She fights through them, self analyzes, society analyzes (a lot!) and tries to come out the better. Self satisfied? yes! but well meaning and thoughtful. chapters are short, bright bursts. accessible.

Very smart.

Short, easily digestible pieces on consumerism.

Summary: A collection of essays on the occasion of the author and her husband buying their first house, considering the nature of capitalism, consumption, work, and class.

It was 1990. We had just moved to a new city, moving from an older, inner ring, blue collar suburb in one city to a three year old housing development on the very edge of our new city, with twice the square footage of house and lot. Shortly after moving, my wife and I were walking in the neighborhood, and she asked me, “did we sell out?”

It is questions like these that Eula Biss explores in this new collection of essays under similar circumstances. If you are familiar with her earlier writings, she lived something of a hand-to-mouth existence at one time. Now she and her husband hold a teaching positions, she at a major university where she earns $20,000 more for doing the same work. She has one various literary words and the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship–a grant affording her the support to write instead of teach. And they have moved out of their apartment and purchased their first house.

In the course of buying furniture, repairing a chimney, purchasing a gravy boat for their first Thanksgiving, and watching her son by a valuable Pokemon card only to give it away to a lonely child, she asks questions about capitalism, consumption, work, class, and more. She wrestles with discussions she has with her institution’s investment counsellor who pushes her to invest in stocks that will create her a nice nest egg in years to come.

Many of the essays recur to one of these themes. For example, she asks a number of different economists and others about the meaning of capitalism. As you might expect, the answers are all over the map. She explores the questions of the place of art in a culture, even as she describes purchasing a membership at the Art Institute of Chicago. She wrestles with the fact that she now pays people to care for her children and to clean her house. She goes on literary excurses through the lives of Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson and Karl Marx and the people around them who enabled their writing lives.

One of the recurring themes is work. What constitutes good work? What distinguishes work, labor, and toil? How ought she feel about the grant coming from capitalist successes that make it possible for her not to work to pursue the writing she loves, that she admits at one point is her play. She explores the phenomenon of people who reach a certain level of success who feel the need to keep up the appearance of working when they really don’t want to.

The challenge I had reading this work was whether this was commendable self-reflection on the ways we are implicated in the capitalist system, or was rather the condemnable self-indulgence of one privileged enough to have the time and means to ask these questions. Other reviewers of this book have reached both of these conclusions.

At first I was inclined to the latter conclusion, until I remembered the questions we asked back in 1990. It seems to me that the greater danger to our souls would have been not to ask the questions, to simply conclude that we had worked hard and deserved what we (and the bank) owned. But it was hardly that simple. The home represented the help of family in a variety of ways and the support of friends. It was a combination of both unearned privileges and our own efforts. The greater danger, it seems to me would have been unreflective self-satisfaction. To know oneself blessed carries with it the responsibility of using that well for the common good.

I think of the work that brought me to this city, work that, with some differences, I am still engaged in. I think it would have been interesting for Biss to explore the nature of vocation or calling. Under the rubric of work, what she describes is a calling as a writer. She touches on this when she describes the greater satisfaction of janitorial staff in a hospital when they see themselves as caring for patients. Callings go beyond what we earn money doing. How fortunate when we are compensated at whatever amount for pursuing them! Biss, herself, knows both sides–of having to work to pursue an unremunerative calling, and to have achieved success in that pursuit. I sense the struggle with this as a guilty pleasure. I wonder if gratitude is a better response, and avoiding any presumptions that it will last.

And now it is 32 years later in the same house. It’s funny how things change. For many, our neighborhood is “starter” homes as the suburbs have extended further out from the city. I wonder what some of the young couples pushing strollers are thinking? Eula Biss makes me reflect anew on what I ought think. Her honesty about money (she names amounts) invites me to a similar kind of honesty about an area we often don’t like to talk about and how all of us are implicated in the economic system of our country.

Summary: A collection of American essays connected to four places the author lived, all exploring the realities of race in which we all are implicated.

Telephone poles. An essay on the introduction of (and resistance to) telephone poles on the landscape becomes an essay on lynching. It turns out that telephone poles were used to hang many black men. Biss writes of how she once thought the “arc and swoop” of phone lines a thing of beauty. Now she comments, “they do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.”

This striking comment captures a theme running through this book. Wherever we go in America, if our eyes are open, we recognize that we are implicated in our nation’s racial history. Nothing is innocent. And yet what also comes through in these essays is that Biss is not resigned to this state of affairs–repentance, a turning, is yet possible.

In her essays we follow Biss from New York to San Diego (and trips into Mexico), Iowa City, and the Rogers Park neighborhood of north Chicago. She describes locking kids into a Harlem school where she is teaching on 9/11 and how New York depleted her. In an essay sharing the title of Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” she speaks of how “New York took everything I had” and like Didion, she left, but unlike Didion, she has not returned, and questions how Didion tolerated so many myths about the city.

She moves to San Diego, working for an African-American newspaper. One of her most telling essays describes Eve Johnson’s struggle with Child Protective Services to gain custody of her own grandchildren, and the repeated barriers she encounters because she is “too black” and her persistence. She notes that she never saw such stories in the New York Times.

Her next move is to Iowa City. She writes about her research into the Black company town of Buxton, no longer in existence that seemed idyllic. There was a fabric of community organizations and a strong sense of identity and self-respect among the black residents. She dares to wonder about the kind of “integration” in which Blacks are a small minority in a sea of white, as was the case with dissatisfied Black students at the University of Iowa. Is such integration really a form of assimilation rather than an affirmation of identity? She also discusses the race blindness she encounters as people decry “looting” after Katrina, but downplay thefts by students after a tornado tore through their city.

The title essay, “No Man’s Land” is set in Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago, bordering Evanston. It was originally called No Man’s Land because of its location. It is also highly integrated with no racial majority, yet she writes both of the racial fears that persist among whites like her in this diverse community and of her husband’s hope that “more white people don’t move here.”

Her concluding essay is titled “All Apologies” and explores the meaning of apologies both in personal life and in our racial history. Amid this is her telling observation: “Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.”

Biss dares to explore both our implicatedness in racism, and the ambiguities of living among one another with all that history. She recognizes the ambiguity in her own family, the mixed racial ancestry that gives her a cousin able to move between white and black communities, even while on the basis of appearance, she cannot. Her essays reveal a very different version of our national character from what many would have the textbook versions to be. She sees both the beauty and value of people and cultures, and the blindness, the hardness, and the obfuscations that sustain these disparate versions of America. In her spare, reflective prose she does not offer answers but invites us to sit with her and see.

I think the overall reason I like this book is for its beauty. For its sentence construction and its metaphors. In one of my favorite sentences, the orchestration of the immune system is compared to baroque dances, a much more comforting image than that of a body going to war.

The collection of essays is mostly a personal reflection on immunity and vaccination in light of the birth of the author's son. Although it is somewhat unfair for me to say that. Though most of the essays involve the author's son, most of them are not actually about her son. In that way this becomes a book about inoculation from a historical and scientific perspective and also from a social and maternal perspective. I liked that all of these intertwined, creating a full view of the issues and arguments surrounding vaccination.

What I enjoyed most, though, were all of the metaphors employed by the author to illuminate both the pro- and anti-vaccination stances. There are many comparisons to Dracula and vampires. The "filth" that were thought to spread disease from the past gives way to the "toxins" that are thought to damage the immune system today. Clinics are compared to marketplaces, where doctors are waiters and patients order procedures from a menu. And the anti-vaccination stance stands as a response to capitalism and the 1% who use the bodies of the 99% to protect themselves. What I find most fascinating about this book is the idea that our bodies, something we define as entirely ours, extend, in a way, out to the community at large. What we do to ourselves does affect other people.

Poetic meditations on ownership, property, capitalism, whiteness, and their interrelations. Hard for me to say much more about the essays, but they could be useful for spurring further thought.

This book is a series of essays about a variety of topics and issues that all pertain to immunity and vaccination. It is a timely read although it was published in 2014 and therefore contains no discussion of Covid. Although this book has plenty of science in it, it is primarily a book of reflection and I enjoyed the author's musings.½

Summary: A collection of essays about vaccines, immunity, fears, risks, and related concerns about environmental pollutants and other dangers faced by the human community.

A few caveats at the beginning of this review. One is that this book was published in 2014. So it was not written in the context of our current polemics about vaccines to combat COVID-19. Also, the author is not a scientist but a talented writer who has won a number of literary awards and is currently an Artist in Residence at Northwestern University. She is the daughter of an oncolgist. She is also the mother of a child suffering many allergies.

The essays in this work reflect her background as an academic, writer, child of a doctor, and a mother. It is evident that she extensively researched this work. She explores the history of vaccination from which we learn that the term comes from the Latin name for the cowpox virus, from which the vaccinated developed immunity to smallpox. She explores how the understanding of immunity developed over the years, earlier issues with the safety of vaccination, and contemporary research and reporting systems that confirm the high level of safety and rarity of risks.

She makes an important point that the effectiveness of vaccines isn’t simply for individuals but for the communities within which they live and travel. Vaccines limit or eliminate infections when a large portion of the population is vaccinated. At one point she challenges the flawed reasoning that one doesn’t need to get vaccinated because others are. This only works when very few think that way, and an ethic that you can’t commend universally runs afoul of Kant’s categorical imperative. She observes, “Immunity is a shared space—a garden we tend together.”

But she is also a mom who wants to do the right thing for her child. Her personal concerns lead her to a sympathetic examination of the fears of others, the sources of reports about autism, and various contaminants in vaccines. She both acknowledge the continuing influence of these reports and how extensive research studies have refuted all of them. She explores the question of risk, and how highly unlikely risks, like a rare side effect that may be attributed to a vaccine, and the much more prevalent and often more serious risks of the disease vaccines are meant to prevent. In the end, she comes down on the side of vaccination–but hardly in an unthinking, “sheeple” fashion. She gently challenges being more afraid of inoculation than disease, and the luxury of entertaining fears that most of the world can’t afford.

She considers other chemicals in our environment from triclosan in our liquid soaps to plastics in our foods, drink bottles, and mattresses. She comes to recognize that there is no absolute immunity we can confer on ourselves or our children from all that could render harm. She experiences this herself when she required transfusion after nearly dying from an inverted uterus during childbirth, and has to trust the safety of the blood she is given. She balances this sense of our vulnerability with our amazing immune system, that can handle multiple vaccines at once because it responds to thousands of threats every day. She asks hard questions, reviews research and doesn’t simply accept authority, but also acts on the best evidence of the science.

The book wanders a bit. It is a collection of essays, not strictly a scientific or history piece. But it is also a human piece, rather than a clinical account or research paper. Biss does what we all need to do–listen, ask questions, be the parent, and learn to discern between flawed and reliable information, and make the best decisions one can. In many ways, this may be a helpful read for those with concerns about vaccines. It challenges us to make decisions not from a place of narcissism but enlightened self interest that also considers the common good. It is written from outside the current polemics, but reflects the concerns so many of us have.

Mit diesem Buch konnte ich gar nichts anfangen, ich habe nichts verstanden, nichts gelernt, keine Denkanstöße bekommen. War es zu schwer? Vielleicht. Aber ich konnte auch keinen roten Faden erkennen. Als hätte ich zwar die Worte gelesen, aber den Sinn nicht verstanden.½

There's a lot of good in this book, which is a somewhat meandering exploration of the writer's relationship to capitalism, especially as she enters her 40s and buys a house. Unfortunately there are times when she dips into Privileged White People White Peopling, such as the following:

"At work the other day, one of our colleagues told me that he'd seen John riding his bike without a helmet. Yes, I told him, John doesn't always wear a helmet. He doesn't wear sunscreen either, and sometimes he doesn't wear a seatbelt. It's an aesthetic, I explained.

"I could also have said that it's a critique, an embodied critique of the middle class cult of personal safety. It's a rejection of the belief that the central project of our lives is to undo our own precariousness. It's a refusal of a way of life devoted to insurance."

Talk about a passage that aged poorly in the Covid Era.

The problem here is that Biss and her husband are aware of their privilege, but are just privileged enough to feel guilty about it. That's enjoyable only to the narrow stratum of those in the same position. Anger, say at Biss' very wealthy employer's salary structure or the con of late capitalism, yes; guilt, not so much. it's also difficult to take someone seriously when their attempt to épater les bourgeois is undone by being decidedly bougie themselves. I'm a middle class white woman myself, but I've been through just enough in life not to feel bad about having a card in my wallet that says Blue Cross PPO.

Biss is on much surer footing when she doesn't look inward, or at least relates her experiences to something external. It's far more interesting to read about Virginia Woolf's relationship to her servants, or Biss' relationship to her washing machine. It is very scattershot, but I liked it: I wasn't expecting a deep economic tome. If one aspect annoyed me it's that Biss' circles seem composed of people just like her: academics, writers, artists. She doesn't really get challenged by anyone. She lives in a gentrifying neighborhood, but her neighbors feel like scenery.

A set of musings on vaccinations and their impact on society, acting as both a history of medicine and also personal essays on the anxieties of new motherhood. Biss makes interesting parallels (e.g., although health demands individual responsibility it still depends on the health of the broader community – representative democracy is a similar type of ‘empowered powerlessness’) but the overall flow was choppy. Previously mentioned facts kept repeating as if being introduced for the first time, which felt like lazy editing.

Privileged white lady has feelings about owning a home, all her consumer goods, and being a gentrifier. Do not recommend, which is a shame because I enjoyed On Immunity.

This was a very well written and truly thought provoking book. There were just countless lines I want to remember and to quote.

Biss did a wonderful job of speaking honestly about the anxieties and worries she experienced in her son's first few years of life, while balancing it with talking about vaccinations, immunity, etc. from social, historical, economical, and cultural points of view. She never shames anyone for how they feel about these topics. And even though it often feels like an 'us' vs. 'them' type of conversation, she delves into the nuances without making the text feel bogged down or dense. The short chapters and the interweaving of history and her personal story with science keep the text engaging and interesting.

Despite the book having been published in 2014, it feels like it could have been published just this year.

On Immunity: An Inoculation was another one of my pandemic reads. I thought it was time to move on from books about pandemics and epidemics to the next stage, vaccination and immunity. Eula Biss’ book is different to what I expected, which is entirely my fault after reading so many science/medicine heavy books. This is a look at immunity from the other side, the humanities if you like. It’s incredibly well researched on both the science and the literature sides, comparing Dracula and other literature to how people view vaccination and disease.

The book is divided into essays of similar lengths, so it’s easy to pick up and read just one or several. Biss became interested in the subject when she had a child and realised how divisive an issue immunisation was, followed by disease, allergies and health in general. She discusses the fear of the unknown, the possible (including those rare adverse effects) and the rumours and misinformation that spread like wildfire. (It’s never the good news stories that do). It’s all done in a very balanced way that’s easy to read. Biss clearly backs up her statements with facts, both historical and present day. Her argument is clear and well researched, but she is never scolding of alternative viewpoints. It’s gentle and persuasive without taking the hard, unchanging lines that scientists sometimes take (myself included). While I missed the hard science, the statistics and the detailed studies, I realise it’s not what the everyday person wants. This is an insight into how real people think (not just those who agree with vaccination, but those who waver and those who oppose) and may be more persuasive than graphs and numbers. From chicken pox lollipops (licked by real children with real chicken pox!) to the anti-vaccine movement, it’s an infinitely interesting read.½

A book about vaccines is certainly timely. On Immunity was actually published in 2014 but resonates even more today. I’ve never read a non-fiction book like it. It felt deeply personal to me, like I was having a conversation with Biss over coffee. She writes about the fear that all mothers have, that no matter the care they take, they will do something that will inadvertently harm their child. She delves into this fear without coming across as condescending, recognizing the fear in herself. But then she writes about community and our obligation to one another as human beings, despite our fears:

“Donations of blood and organs move between us, exiting one body and entering another, and so too with immunity, which is a common trust as much as it is a private account. Those who draw on collective immunity owe our health to our neighbors.”

I learned a lot about the history of vaccines from this book. I was surprised to learn that they have been around for hundreds of years. We like to credit individuals with developing vaccines but in truth, they are the result of decades of collective knowledge. At times, it may seem like Biss is getting off-track but then bam, what seemed like a tangent about Dracula or Coca-Cola, ends up coming back to immunity and vaccines and makes total sense. My copy of the book is highlighted throughout and filled with Post-Its marking ah-ha moments I had while reading. One that particularly resonated with me was:

“Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears that the rest of the world cannot afford.”

Biss takes great care with her words. It’s amazing how much information is packed into On Immunity’s 160 pages. It’s hard to describe what a brilliant, original book this is. Please read it and see for yourself. Highly, highly recommended.

As beautiful as you can possibly imagine an essay collection about race, crime and our collective responsibility to one another as Americans can be. When you think Baldwin or Didion or Fadiman, now also think Biss. I will be giving copies of this magical book to everyone.

Eula Biss' work eludes categorization. Her autobiographical snippets and vignettes are organized by memory and association, not chronology, and occasionally punctuated with excerpts from a carpenter's handbook and the "black box" recordings of pilots. From this impressionistic style, themes emerge: can grown children understand their parents as individuals? Is it possible to build a different kind of relationship or marriage than the one you grew up knowing?

Quotes

She has said so many things that have gone unheard. Off the record.
Mother: "He made me feel like I wasn't really a writer if I wasn't published. It was as if my poetry didn't mean anything unless it was accepted by someone else." (13)

Are we going to keep living the same stories our parents lived? (39)

What if an entire generation were to reject their central story line? (43)

When he says, "Why can't you follow a recipe?" I am hurt, because I know that he is not just asking why I can't be told what to do, but why I can't let things be simple. (55)

When a woman finally begins to write for herself, Virginia Woolf wondered, what she will have to say? [sic] And how will she say it? ...And I went on to ponder how a woman nowadays would write a poetic tragedy in five acts - would she use verse - would she not use prose rather? (59)

The picture was taken at exactly the right moment, but there was no more film on the roll. (71)

Thanks to a 4 hour flight, I got to dig into this excellent and insightful book today. I am a huge proponent of vaccination, and this solidified my support of vaccinating children and adults for bettering public health. I've long declared that the anti-vaxx movement has its base in white privilege, which this book definitely affirms. Further, Biss argues for vaccination as social justice, and that kind of blew my mind. When we protect our children's health, our herd immunity may protect the less fortunate? Whoa.