PositiveThe GuardianJust as you feel Mukherjee has affection even for the coldest and most arrogant of the cancer pioneers, so you sense his fascination with the dreaded disease itself. While his concern for his patients – and in particular Carla, whose leukaemia becomes one of the central motifs of the book – is real and feelingly described, it takes second place to his fascination with the behaviour of the cancer, which \'explodes\' out of their cells, and to the cat and mouse game that science has had to play to try to find ways to stop it in its tracks. Perhaps it is his own feeling for the disease that makes this Pulitzer prize-winning book so readable – at the same time an encyclopedic history of scientific progress against history and ripping yarn.
