AUDIOBOOK
About
From a National Book Award finalist and author of When Smoke Ran Like Water comes a searing, haunting and deeply personal account of the so-called war on cancer. The war on cancer set out to find, treat, and cure a disease. Left untouched were many of the things known to cause cancer, including tobacco, the workplace, radiation, or the global environment. Proof of how the world in which we live and work affects whether we get cancer was either overlooked or suppressed. This has been no accident. The war on cancer was run by leaders of industries that made cancer-causing products and sometimes also profited from drugs and technologies for finding and treating the disease. Filled with compelling personalities and never-before-revealed information, The Secret History of the War on Cancer shows how we began fighting the wrong war, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies, a legacy that persists to this day. This is the gripping story of a major public health effort diverted and distorted for private gain.
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Reviews
"[Davis] illuminates the underbelly of medical research…The best watchdogs are often the most obsessive, using shock and alarm as a prelude to discussion…Devra Davis is a natural for this role."
Washington Post
"In her devastating, twenty-years-in-the-making exposé…Devra Davis…shows how cancer researchers, bankrolled by petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies, among others, collude in 'the science of doubt promotion'…Davis diagnoses two of the most lethal diseases of modern society: secrecy and self-interest. This book is a dramatic plea for a cure."
O, The Oprah Magazine
"Joining this increasingly fractious debate with devastating force, Devra Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, claims that the war 'has been fighting many of the wrong battles with the wrong weapons and the wrong leaders.' She calculates that these 'fundamental misdirections' have thrown away well over a million American lives.
New York Review of Books