Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer

our understanding of thatphenomenon. Rachel Carson brought the environmentalist view vigorously into the public arena in 1962 with Silent Spring. Since then, argument has proceeded about the extent to which industrial processes and their products cause cancer and, whatever that extent, what should be done about it. The tone of Cancer Wars, written with a historian's perspective on the environmentalist-antienvironmentalist struggle over cancer causation, lies midway between scientific restraint and journalistic expression. For those familiar with the literature, the book can be said to avoid the extremes of either Samuel S. Epstein's The Politics ofCan-