My only disappointment was that there are no easy answers for those of us suffering from dysfunctional immune systems! It's one of the last frontiers of medical science. I thought I already knew a lot about the immune system, but I learned plenty while listening to this book. He doesn't oversimplify, either, and gets into some of the nitty-gritty of different kinds of cells within the immune system. This is probably why he does such a great job of describing this complicated system in simple terms. He is a reporter, someone who became interested in the immune system because of his friend's cancer battle, so he approaches the topic from a layperson's perspective. One thing I really liked about this book was that the author is not a medical doctor or scientist. He describes the amazing advances in medical science and the study of the immune system in the past 100 years or so, but also acknowledges the limits of our current knowledge. The author explains the complexities of the immune system in easy-to-understand ways and directly applies the science to real people through his case studies. In fact, much of the book is extra-interesting in light of the public health crisis of the past two years.

Fauci was properly qualified to lead our fight against the pandemic, this book will unintentionally answer that question with a resounding yes. Anthony Fauci (who no one in the general public had ever heard of when this book was published!). In addition to telling the stories of these four patients as a framework for the book, Richtel also reviews the history of immune medicine and interviews the top doctors and researchers in the field, including one immune expert at the top of his career, Dr. He not only explains his disease (and that of the other three patients) but tells us about each of them personally and what their lives are like so that we care about them. The author also plays a personal role in the narrative, as the cancer patient is his childhood friend, Jason, and the reason he began researching the immune system in the first place. I learned a lot listening to this book and found it very engaging.Īs the sub-subtitle indicates, this book explains the complexities of the immune system in part by looking at its role in the lives of four real-life patients: one man with cancer undergoing immunotherapy, one man who's been living with AIDS since the 80's, and two women with different types of autoimmune conditions.

This book caught my eye when it was released in 2019, in part because I have a chronic illness that is an immune disorder, but it became even more relevant-for everyone-when the COVID-19 pandemic began. One of my audiobook picks for Nonfiction November was An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives by Matt Richtel.

An elegant defense review