Malignant
Описание книги
Nearly half of all Americans will be diagnosed with an invasive cancer—an all-too ordinary aspect of daily life. Through a powerful combination of cultural analysis and memoir, this stunningly original book explores why cancer remains so confounding, despite the billions of dollars spent in the search for a cure. Amidst furious debates over its causes and treatments, scientists generate reams of data—information that ultimately obscures as much as it clarifies. Award-winning anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain deftly unscrambles the high stakes of the resulting confusion. Expertly reading across a range of material that includes history, oncology, law, economics, and literature, Jain explains how a national culture that simultaneously aims to deny, profit from, and cure cancer entraps us in a state of paradox—one that makes the world of cancer virtually impossible to navigate for doctors, patients, caretakers, and policy makers alike. This chronicle, burning with urgency and substance leavened with brio and wit, offers a lucid guide to understanding and navigating the quicksand of uncertainty at the heart of cancer. <i>Malignant</i> vitally shifts the terms of an epic battle we have been losing for decades: the war on cancer.
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Praise for Malignant
“An extraordinary work of disciplined observation and astonishing precision, Malignant reveals how the common course of cancer has worked its way into the American imaginary.”
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Cancer, as a chimera, gains different registers of meaning in different places. It envelops and is an effect of oncologists, insurance provisions, support groups, survivor workshops, and medical research. Cancer is stacks of Reader’s Digests, furtive glances and hasty conversations in waiting rooms. It is evenings spent working out complicated medical bills and long phone calls with befuddled insurance bureaucrats. It is cracking the code of how to play your “cancer card” and what value, versus what backlash, it might have. It is wondering if anyone would come to your funeral. Would you look like a big dork if you died in the summer while everyone was on vacation?
FIGURE 1. California Proposition 65, passed in 1986 through a ballot measure, requires businesses to post warning signs when exposing customers or bystanders to specific levels of chemicals listed on a twenty-two-page roster of known, legal carcinogens. The business must determine any likely exposure that will result from a chemical. The signs are posted everywhere in California, like flags of surrender. (Photo by author, Stanford Cancer Center parking lot)
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