A fascinating account of how our immune system works, illustrated by several case studies. While it makes a deep dive into the workings of our immune system, and how we came to learn about it, the author follows the lives of several individuals that illustrate different aspects. The book keeps a big-picture perspective of the role and impact of these processes on humanity.

I bought this book on one of my first trips back to the bookstore during the pandemic (for obvious reasons), but I didn't read it right away. As it turns out, I am glad that I didn't, as I talked my dad into choosing this for our ongoing buddy read project, and it was definitely better that way. Both on the chapter-a-week pace and having someone to dissect this with.

I did get a lot out of this book, though I often thought I would like it better if it had a better editor and/or it had been written by a scientist rather than a journalist. Still, this book is definitely framed around personal stories, and as a reporter he was well suited to telling those (though some of his little offhand societal observations provoked big eyerolls from me.)

I probably would have been more annoyed reading this alone, but this was good enough. ( )

An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System:
An exploration of the human immune system illustrated with four immunotherapy cases to explain how our defense systems protect and sometimes injure the body.
The topic is interesting, the writing style mixes anecdotal with scientific details. ( )

Three years late with my review, I'm horribly embarrassed to say. It's the only time I've been seriously delinquent in reviewing an ER book, and it's particularly embarrassing in this case considering that I had requested this book because of my own ongoing experience with prostate cancer. Somehow, I just managed to mislay An Elegant Defense and just found it a week ago while doing some household clean-up and inventorying of my library.

I'm giving this 4****. I think it could have been better. For some reason (and perhaps I'm just guilty of reading it a little too quickly), the technical medical chapters seemed a bit difficult for me. Years ago, back in the late 80s and through most of the 90s, my work as a lawyer included medical issues pertaining to HIV, so I was familiar with B cells, T-helper cells, and T-killer cells; but the medical research has expanded greatly in the current century. One interesting comment in this book involves the use of disabled HIV as a vector to insert an experimental gene into a young leukemia patient's system, something that would never have occurred without the extensive research on HIV-AIDS over the past decades.

Richtel primarily addresses HIV (involving a patient whose immune system has successfully combatted the virus apparently without significant medical intervention), auto-immune disease, and cancer, combining theoretical medical discussion with individual patient biographies (not always as well integrated as between theory and biography as I would have liked, but still fairly successful). One interesting discussion also involves an Alzheimer's patient, with consideration of immune-system factors that might be associated with Alzheimer's disease, though this is a rather cursory discussion and those interested in Alzheimer's might be better off reading The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It by Dr. Jason Karlawish, the co-director of the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia.

I'm going to give this one a reread, I think, in a few months. I'm scheduled for a first appointment with a Jefferson University (Philadelphia) dermatologist for a very serious rash, and some of the more technical immunological discussions in An Elegant Defense might prove of more personal interest to me once I get more involved in my own dermatological treatment protocols.

So, 4****, and an apology to the author as well as to LT-ER for the delay in this review. ( )

I noped out near the beginning when the author claimed IBS as an autoimmune disease. He also blindly accepts the concept of autoimmunity being widely causitive despite a lack of evidence for numerous diseases. I checked Mr. Richtel's biography and decided, in the future, I will refrain from reading immunology books from somebody without any background in medicine.