Despite cancer being the number two cause of death in the USA, and even despite knowing personal friends and family members who have had cancer and died of cancer, I knew amazingly little about cancer before reading this book. I didn't even know what chemotherapy actually was, just that it makes people feel like hell as their hair falls out.

Chemotherapy is just that - chemicals either injected or ingested, meant to kill the cancer. It is literally poison. It kills cancer by killing everything, pretty much. The idea in a nutshell is to get as close as you can to poisoning a person to death, and hope that they survive and that the cancer doesn't. Hell, it was discovered by trail and error! A bunch of leukemia kids with zero hope of survival were just fed dozens of different poisons on a hunch that something interesting might happen to them. Almost everybody died - but over thirty years of mixing and matching the chemicals, we've ended up with a crazy amalgam that stands a chance of stopping cancer.

The book covered quite a bit - and despite trying to have a happy ending, it was pretty depressing. Pretty much, we're all going to get cancer and die from it eventually. Still, it was a great narrative, and a great look at the history of the disease.