Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us [PDF, ePub, Mobi]

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. Malignant vitally shifts the terms of an epic battle we have been losing for decades: the war on cancer.

"The writing is marvelous and the scholarship is incredible -- but you aren't prepared for the disarming humor, or the delicate dissection of the psyche that Jain achieves. I could not stop reading this book."
--Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of Emperor of All Maladies, Pulitzer Prize Winner

"Malignant is a beneficent book, a tough gift for all of us. I - we - need this scholarly, angry, intimate, objective, smart, moving book that teaches us how to endure and even maybe thrive in the ‘rubble.’"
--Donna Haraway, author of Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

"Malignant is the most important book about cancer in decades. Lochlann Jain brilliantly compels us to look straight into its metastases and cultural malignancies. In cancer's claws we find, not just the limits of existence, but also a poetics of resistance."
--Jonathan Metzl MD, PhD, author of The Protest Psychosis

"I found myself entertained, informed, surprised and ultimately transformed by this wonderful narrative."
--Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone

S. Lochlann Jain is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and author of Injury: The Politics of Product Design and Safety Law in the United States.