Eula Biss, _On Immunity: An Inoculation_

MAINLY ABOUT THE anxiety over infant immunizations of a few years back, now largely quelled I think, but this book does not depend on topicality all that much. Walden has tips for living in the countryside, but we read it more for the sensibility it presents and the grain of its voice; On Immunity similarly is more than the information it conveys. It's contemplative, in a down-to-earth way; it contains information, but is more thoughtful, personal, exploratory than advisory.

Immunity, in the medical sense, has a lot to do with what the body recognizes as its own and what it identifies as a hostile intruder, and Biss spins out the metaphorical potential of this in pondering self-and-other, us-and-them questions, as well as science-and-superstition, reason-and-emotion, expert-and-layperson sorts of agons. The chapters are short and would work (I think) as free-standing essays, vivid, graceful, humane.

Which reminds me of my guess about the subtitle, "An Inoculation." In what sense is the book about a small quantity of illness taken from one body and placed in another, giving that other body a little dose of evil to prevent a greater one from taking hold?

In the sense that Biss's anxiety-verging-on-panic for her infant son (that is, the recognizably perfectly normal behavior of a new mother) turns out to inoculate us (supposing we have infants arriving in our own lives) against the follies that anxiety and panic all too readily lend themselves to.

Biss is probably a lot better grounded and less susceptible to jumpiness than the persona of the book is, but the contrast between the "I" of the book and her calm of her husband, the common sense of her oncologist father, and the liveliness and imagination of her pre-schooler, who somehow survived infancy, repeatedly testifies to the wisdom of not letting what you read on the internet get the better of you.