PositiveThe New YorkerBiss’s gracious rhetoric and her insistence that she feels \'uncomfortable with both sides\' of the rancorous fight may frustrate readers looking for a pro-vaccine polemic. Yet her approach might actually be more likely to sway fearful parents, offering them an alternative set of images and associations to use in thinking about immunization ... In one of the book’s most compelling passages, Biss takes on the question of whether shots are \'unnatural,\' as some parents fear ... She also invokes the frontier spirit with an image of personal strength and determination: \'Vaccination is a kind of domestication of a wild thing, in that it involves our ability to harness a virus and break it like a horse, but its action depends on the natural response of the body.\' This is writing designed to conquer anxiety. For, as Biss comes to realize, a \'central question of both citizenship and motherhood\' is \'What will we do with our fear?\'