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A review by literary_faerie
On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss
3.0
I really loved the prose and I am grateful that Biss provided a list of works that inspired her essays because the quotes that she pulled were fascinating and thought provoking. However, I personally think this book is just a tad too white, ableist, and subtly racist to truly be anything more than a very low 3 stars.
She means very well, I can tell but, while she interrogates and shakes her head at other people’s biases towards vaccines and modern medicine, she’s unable to interrogate her own biases and conclusions that are largely borne of the fact that she’s a (presumably) straight, white, upper-class woman living in the suburbs.
Some of the anecdotes that she shares are downright annoying. There is a part towards the end where she recalls having a conversation with one of her gay male friends about plagues or whatever and he has to tell her something to the effect of “you don’t need to lecture me about plagues. I lived through the AIDS crisis.” She doesn’t follow up with an apology in the moment and there is no mention about how condescending and unthinking she was to have even put him in that very awkward position. There are also a few vaguely racist and ableist anecdotes and lines that are enough to let me know that the only people who laid eyes on this book before being published were white, straight, abled people. Disappointing.
She means very well, I can tell but, while she interrogates and shakes her head at other people’s biases towards vaccines and modern medicine, she’s unable to interrogate her own biases and conclusions that are largely borne of the fact that she’s a (presumably) straight, white, upper-class woman living in the suburbs.
Some of the anecdotes that she shares are downright annoying. There is a part towards the end where she recalls having a conversation with one of her gay male friends about plagues or whatever and he has to tell her something to the effect of “you don’t need to lecture me about plagues. I lived through the AIDS crisis.” She doesn’t follow up with an apology in the moment and there is no mention about how condescending and unthinking she was to have even put him in that very awkward position. There are also a few vaguely racist and ableist anecdotes and lines that are enough to let me know that the only people who laid eyes on this book before being published were white, straight, abled people. Disappointing.