MixedThe London Review of Books... captures the excitement of biomedical research and discovery, the wonder at the complexities of cancer and the bodies it inhabits, and the thrill of major advances in knowledge and practice ... an ambitious intellectual, social and cultural history of this murderous, shape-shifting companion, and of efforts to understand and control it. He brings recent historical scholarship to a broader audience, interweaves it with his own experience as a physician, and adds his own research on more recent developments in cancer. It has limitations, however: it focuses on the US rather than Europe, on developments after the Second World War not before it, and on biological causes. Mukherjee has little interest in environmental or lifestyle causes of cancer; he gives only a brief mention of the struggles over tobacco that followed epidemiological evidence in the 1940s and 1950s of a link between smoking and lung cancer ... his account of therapeutic interventions is selective. He tells us much more about chemotherapy and surgery than about radiotherapy. Yet radiotherapy was the major alternative and supplement to surgery for almost half a century before chemotherapy ... He also downplays the importance of efforts to get public support for anti-cancer campaigns.