An excellent read. I thought it might have been a dry read, but Mukherjee keeps the audience captivated with side stories and interresting facts and trivia.

I listened to the book as a 16 cd book on tape while driving up and down the WhyteMud Freeway....crushingly sad to hear how someone journeys through cancer ...it can be beaten down,weakened, and almost absent, and still lurk back in and kill. Lots of info about the disease, the politics, and the big personalities who took risks to rid the world of this scourge. Recommended. Also recccomend White Death the history of TB

trully a great detailed biography of cancer indeed. I learned so much about it.

This is an easily understandable of a confusing illness that is even more valuable now (Sept, '11) with the advent of new drugs to treat cance.

Perfect combination of science and literature. An enlightening "story" of devotion, struggle, and intellect of doctors to cure cancer. A fantastic read for both the scientific and non-scientific. A true jem of the 21th century.

Excellent book. A detailed, yet easy-to-understand, history of the disease and the way researchers and doctors have fought it.

I've lost three close relatives to cancer (mother-in-law, mother, wife, in that order). Some of the treatments available now weren't even dreamed of when the first of these deaths occurred in 1990. And even cutting edge treatment is sometimes ineffective, as the third death, in 2008 demonstrates. In between, as this excellent book explains in mostly non-technical language, we've learned an amazing amount about what cancer is -- essentially an accumulation of mutations in our own cells that drive them to grow and reproduce without end. The book covers over 4,500 years of human experience with cancer, but focuses on the past 250 or so, when the greatest advances have been made, from surgery, to radiation, to chemotherapy. Chemotherapy, perhaps the most potent treatment, has changed radically, from drugs with horrible side effects that killed healthy cells along with cancer cells, to synthetic molecules that are custom designed to attack certain types of cancer. Many cancers have gone from lethal to chronic. There is sometimes an overwhelming wealth of detail, but overall the book remains very readable, even as it necessarily becomes more technical as the research moves into the genetics of cancer in the past 20 years or so. If you can remember your high school biology, you'll get more out of this book.

This easy-to-read book outlines the history of chemotherapy, with particular emphasis on the development of the treatment protocol for childhood leukemia.

This history of cancer and cancer research reads like a horror story spanning hundreds of years. The monster is infinitely tenacious and adaptable, and the heroes tend to become monstrous themselves in the course of the struggle. This latter theme is particularly evident in the sections on heroic breast surgery and heroic chemotherapy. Aside from its considerable literary merit, the book brings one up to date on what is now known about cancers, their causes, and their treatment.

An illuminating look at cancer research and treatment over the last century. A bit technical at times, but full of fascinating information.