Virology

April 15, 2022
The essays in this unusual collection focus on the immense impact that viruses exert on human life, from health to relationships, culture, society, and even metaphors (""going viral""). Particular attention is paid to HIV and COVID-19. For starters, viruses are the most plentiful form of life on the planet. They are all around us and within us. They're hardy microorganisms and creepy, too. Not exactly alive or dead, viruses only ""yearn"" to replicate. Biologist Osmundson calls them ""little genetic machines with one goal in mind: to copy themselves."" While sharing intimate details of his personal life, he ponders issues of identity and queerness, fear and risk, disease and inequity, destruction and symbiosis. Sprinkled in the essays are quotes from such writers as Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, and Joan Didion. One notable chapter, ""On Endings,"" suggests rethinking health and illness as not two distinct realms but rather a ""quantum state of sick/well."" Microorganisms rule our world. Best to coexist with viruses whenever possible. But we must do battle with the disease-causing kinds, and vaccines, public health measures, and preparation do provide a potent defense.

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Starred review from May 9, 2022
Microbiologist Osmundson (Capsid) probes the relationship between humans and viruses in this superb essay collection. “On Replication” reminds that, while “there are 250 million viruses in every 0.001 liter of ocean water,” they can’t replicate on their own. In “On War,” Osmundson questions the use of martial rhetoric to describe outbreaks: “Wars are won through mass death. A virus will never be dominated,” he suggests, recommending an approach to quarantine and social distancing that’s based on care and community. “On Going Viral” is a sharp look at “viral” content online, in which Osmundson makes a case that “most viruses do nothing. How boring, how painfully banal.” “On Endings” is a moving reflection on the HIV epidemic, in which Osmundson considers how “queer people provide a model... for living rightly in a wrong world.” Indeed, throughout, he cannily interweaves queer theory and science: “Queer childhood is waiting for the possibility to be—to make—one’s full self. Quarantine is putting the full possibility of social relations—one way to make oneself with others—on hold out of respect for the desire of living beings to keep on living,” he writes in “On Risk.” Original and bubbling with curiosity, this is a masterful achievement.

Starred review from June 1, 2022

Osmundson (microbiology, New York Univ.; Inside/Out) writes with a raw and urgent fierceness in this unique collection of essays. The scientist, researcher, and HIV/AIDS advocate (he reveres early activists like the group ACT-UP) captures a moment in time--the first two years of the COVID pandemic--and situates it in a larger historical context of identity, disease, and medicine. Writing from the perspective of a queer, white microbiologist, Osmundson intersperses intensely personal diary entries with his knowledge of viruses and viral diseases (especially COVID and HIV). He examines how the medical establishment, a capitalist society, and the government, use a collective fear of disease to subjugate and discriminate against BIPOC and queer people and other marginalized groups. Osmundson references the work of many great writers and thinkers, including Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Eula Biss, Jos� Esteban Mu�oz, and Octavia Butler, making this a rich reading experience. His forceful, honest reckoning with the medical establishment and its relationship to race and disease takes to task even allies within the science and LGBTQ+ communities. VERDICT Osmundson writes with hope for a world where racial inequities are addressed and people treat each other with love and kindness. Just as viruses change and mutate, so, too, can people, he suggests. Recommended.--Ragan O'Malley

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Starred review from April 15, 2022
A gay biologist looks at the Covid-19 pandemic through the lenses of queerness and social justice. NYU microbiology professor Osmundson is a literary essayist--his models and polestars are writers like Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Eula Biss, though he also thoughtfully critiques their work--as well as a cleareyed science writer. His ability to explicate queer theory and epidemiology allows him to make thoughtful connections between the pandemic and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Then as now, he observes, racist responses to outbreaks led to scapegoating, demonization, and needless death; then as now, relationships are redefined by medications and shifting definitions of wellness. The author notes how war metaphors deployed during outbreaks--e.g., likening essential workers or the sick as "heroes"--have long been ethically fraught, giving people license to treat marginalized victims as acceptable losses. "Unexamined Whiteness" in medicine and media tends to make the virus deadlier for minority communities, and capitalism only exacerbates the problem. Osmundson humanizes this dynamic by thoughtfully shifting from his own personal experience--in relationships, at sex clubs, in an activist Covid-19 research group--to the bigger picture of the pandemic. His writing about viruses themselves can be technical, but he adds an emotional valence, approaching them as undiscriminating, common to all human beings. The author writes in various modes, from literary criticism to polemic (Andrew Sullivan comes in for particular scorn) to diarist, the last of which is a potent reminder of the uncertainty and fear that came with the arrival of Covid-19. Throughout, Osmundson exposes how a virus reveals societies' connections and bigotries. "Where we place our bodies, and with whom, is a biological choice," he writes, "and a moral and political one." A welcome, well-informed, queer-positive study of the blind spots a pandemic reveals.

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