You know the feeling that you get when you're done reading a book on the subject and realize how it changed your understanding of the field dramatically? Such as Feynman's Lectures on Physics, A Brief History of Time, or The Emperor's New Mind? This magnificent treatise on cancer is just what the subject needed - a meticulous, no-holds-barred treatment that reveals a plethora of information on cancer, and our ancient, never-ending war with it - a constantly shape-shifting enemy whose root is ourselves.
Mukherjee describes in eye-watering detail how our understanding of cancer has changed in around four thousand years, and how the landscape of the 'War Against Cancer' has undergone multiple paradigm shifts - from the witch-doctors who thought the best cure for the then-unnamed disease was crab soup; to current efforts, which are a mixture of chemotherapy and targeted drugs, some of which can almost erase certain cancers from its roots.
Absolutely no detail is withheld from the reader - the politics, the money, the legal battles over potential cures and clinical trials, the innumerable doctors involved, the patients whose lives were altered with the onset of the disease, and how each potential drug worked (or why it stopped working).
Mukherjee also focuses on how patients embrace their sickness as the new normal, and how some patients accept death easier than doctors - his work is, above all, a testimony to the tenacity and resilience of the human spirit.
In conclusion, although this might not be the most readable book, it is definitely one of the most sobering books I have ever encountered. A must-read. ( )

Great book. It's very helpful for anyone who is a caregiver or is afflicted with Cancer. It gave me a new perspective as a caregiver/ It is very detailed and requires some work to read and understand. ( )

The book starts out rooted firmly in the human experience, told through the stories of patients, doctors, and discoverers from the ancients up through the modern era. I found these stories fascinating and often incredibly sad; I could relate to them. Around the 1960s the book shifts into a more technical vein, which makes sense because this is when so many innovations in cancer research and treatment began, but I found myself disengaging from the story. The author does a laudable job of keeping the human experience a part of the story, but this is a biography of cancer - not humans - and at some point the story becomes less about "us" and more about "it". Or rather, "them", because one of the most fascinating parts of the book was seeing how heterogenous cancer is in the human body. Lymphomas are completely different from breast cancer, which is completely different from sarcoma, etc. I truly had no idea.

Also fascinating was how breast cancer was the focus of cancer research for literally hundreds of years. This seems like a woman-positive situation until you discover the devastating surgeries and experiments that doctors inflicted on the female body. Would they have been so quick to carve out literal pounds of flesh if these were male bodies? Would male patients have had more authority over their own care, and been fully informed about what was about to be done to their bodies? Kudos to the author for explicitly calling out the medical industry on its historically cavalier treatment of women, and acknowledging the women of the 1970s who refused to be sidelined in their own treatment, and thus forged the patients' rights movement out of the second-wave feminist movement. ( )

Me tomó varios meses leer este libro, varios de ellos mientras convivía con una persona muy cercana, enferma de cáncer. Entonces, me costó mucho trabajo, tanto que tuve que dejarlo en espera un par de meses.

Ahora que he vuelto a él, lo encuentro un libro súper intenso por los casos de estudio, por las metáforas, por las explicaciones y la información científica (que además es bastante accesible a un lector sin conocimiento de medicina, biología, química o todas las disciplinas que se unen para luchar contra esta enfermedad).

Me quedo con un fragmento casi al final del libro que creo resume esta lectura: "La mejor manera de 'ganar' la guerra contra el cáncer consiste, quizás, en redefinir la victoria". ( )

This Pulitzer prize winning expansive history of the disease(s) known as cancer is a pretty epic reading challenge, but well worth the effort. Mukherjee dives into his subject chronologically (from ancient and medieval treatises on the disease up through current genetic discoveries), thematically (by treatment -- surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, targeted agents; political advocacy and funding; research and clinical trials; prevention -- particularly in the context of anti-smoking campaigns), and personally with stories of his own medical training and experiences with cancer patients. The scope is so broad that you would think the approach would feel scattered, but Mukherjee has an ability to control the many threads of his narrative and dig deep into the background of individual researchers, discoveries, and treatments which grounds the reader in a narrative foundation and keeps the whole thing from running off the rails. As a breast cancer patient I was particularly fascinated with the history of the embrace and then rejection of ever more radical mastectomy surgeries, the dashed promise of scorched-earth chemo followed by a bone marrow transplant as a treatment for metastatic breast cancer, and the fascinating history of patient advocacy clashing (and then cooperating) with the pharmaceutical industry in the development of Herceptin, a wildly successful targeted treatment for Her-2 positive breast cancer. The book also helped me get my head around how clinical trials are designed and how the medical profession approaches oncology. And he FINALLY explained what kinases are and how they work in a way that clicked with my brain (as a person on her second flavor of a cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor, this is news I could use). While his prose can sometimes be a bit florid and I didn't love every one of his patient characterizations, this was still a great read and I am very interested in reading his new book, The Song of the Cell. Human bodies are so complicated, and cancer uniquely harnesses this complexity to do its thing. Mukherjee really brings this all home in an understandable and comprehensive way. ( )