IMMUNE will explain the Immune System in a time where everybody could know a little bit more about it, in a fun, descriptive way, with many full-color illustrations.

IMMUNE:
How Your Body Wages War in the Fight Against Disease
by Philipp Dettmer
Random House, Autumn 2021

The immune system is one of these things everybody is familiar with to some degree. We know that it is good to have one and that if you have a strong one you are healthy or something. But it is also subject to a wide range of unscientific ideas and misconceptions based on the fact that most people don’t actually understand what is going on when they are sick. Which is a shame, because it is one of the most fascinating and complex systems the human body has to offer on multiple levels. Learning about the immune system is not just useful, it is exciting and filled with drama and mind boggling stories about self sacrifice, brilliant strategies, devastating defeat and in the end, death or victory. In this book, we will take a look at the pure mind numbing scope of the immune system, its most important soldiers and how they interact. We’ll explore the immune organs most people have never even heard about. And we’ll cover questions like how the immune system organizes millions of fighters over distances equivalent to continents in human scales, in mere hours. But we will not only praise its countless wonders. Our bodies‘ defenses are only as impressive as their adversaries and there are plenty of those.  We’ll take a deeper look at a variety of the most popular and horrible diseases, from AIDS to the flu and common cold, pneumonia, salmonella, the Coronavirus, diarrhoeal diseases, brain eating amoeba, or Tuberculosis.  Finally we will discuss what happens when the immune system gets it wrong and starts attacking the body it is supposed to protect, commonly known as autoimmune disease.

Philipp Dettmer is an Information Designer living in Munich, Germany, and the founder of kurzgesagt – in a nutshell, one of the biggest educational channels on Youtube with about 12 million subscribers and a team of 35 people. Philipp remains the head writer and is responsible for the content and philosophy of the channel.