When I first saw this title, I recoiled in horror at the thought of reading a book on cancer. One of my primary motivations for reading is entertainment, and I found it hard to convince myself that a book on a topic like "cancer" would fit the bill. The fact that this book won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2011 was not lost on me and so I read a few reviews of the book on amazon. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I pulled the trigger and ordered the book.
Once I started reading the book, I was simply blown away. I expected the book to be high on educational content, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that Siddhartha is a very accomplished writer and his prose was like butter. He describes the history of cancer with a personal touch that makes you feel that he rubbed shoulders with some of the early pioneers. He walks you through the evolution of knowledge on the cause and treatment of cancer like a mystery novel. There's a fair amount of description and debate on public policy on Cancer Research. Siddhartha devotes a good portion of the novel on the Laskerites and the effort that they put into getting Federal funding for Cancer Research. While this helped the treatment of cancer, there were many skeptics who felt that this was only encouraging more trial and error treatment, that would come up short in our understanding of Cancer. James Watson, one of the scientists who was responsible for the seminal work on DNA summed it up best when he said "we must reject the notion that we will be lucky. … Instead we will be witnessing a massive expansion of well-intentioned mediocrity."
The book is anything but mediocre, and is definitely enlightening. You learn that not all cancer is the same; cancer is very much our normal cell dividing activity gone haywire; different kinds of cancer require different kinds of treatment; several forms of cancer have very good remedies.
Overall, I highly recommend this book to folks who have a scientific bent and are eager to learn about what makes cancer special.
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