On Immunity
Eula Biss · 2014
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.
The case against
Biss circles her subject through Dracula and the myth of Achilles more readily than through data, and the fragment form lets her gesture where an argument would have to commit. The book's anxieties are also conspicuously class-bound: the worried, well-resourced mother weighing risks most parents never get the leisure to weigh. Lovely sentences; whether they amount to an argument about vaccination is another question.
Essays · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
