To Dance With the Devil: The New War on Breast Cancer - Hardcover

Stabiner, Karen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385312849 ISBN 13: 9780385312844

Publisher: Delacorte Press, 1997

Synopsis

This is the story of a killer and the people fighting to stop it.

Breast cancer takes the life of an American woman every twelve minutes.  There is no sure cure for the disease, no known way to prevent it, and no means of predicting whom it will strike next.  A community of dogged adversaries stands in opposition to it: mavericks and bureaucrats, brilliant innovators and everyday heroes.  Often at passionate odds in temper and technique, they are
united in their resolve against an elusive, implacable enemy.  To Dance with the Devil is an unprecedented behind-the-scenes account from the war on one of medicine's most pernicious foes.

The product of over three years of research, scores of interviews with the nation's top doctors, policymakers, researchers, and activists, and in-depth reporting on the patients and clinicians who invited the author into their lives, To Dance with the Devil is at once an up-to-the-minute report and a gripping human drama.  For a year Karen Stabiner was a steady observer at the
innovative UCLA Breast Center, following the progress of Dr. Susan Love, the eminent breast surgeon and author, and a number of Love's patients.  From UCLA, Stabiner's narrative spirals out to examine the turbulent national scene: partisan politics and budget crises; pioneering research and dire experimental treatments; managed care and the battle to shape its future; high stakes, high
society fund-raising; and the brutally competitive race for answers and dollars.  

From the White House and the halls of Congress to the cutting-edge labs of top genetic researchers, from glittering charity events to the realities of managed care and the private triumphs and tragedies of individual patients, here is a must-read inside story of the new campaign against breast cancer -- a new paradigm of hope for women and those who love them.  It is a stunning account, destined to irrevocably change the way we think about this devastating epidemic.

About this title

Review

It's hard to shape slippery, sophisticated medical issues into a page-turner, but Karen Stabiner does this in a book that ushers us through the realm of women, doctors, and researchers uncomfortably banded together to fight breast cancer. At its hub is the personable, controversial breast surgeon Dr. Susan Love (Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book). She unmercifully twits others in the field, proclaiming mammography's limits and labeling the current, clumsy approaches to "curing" cancer "slash, burn, and poison." Other spokes on the wheel are well-sketched patients and researchers chasing genetic culprits and better treatments. Dead-ends and triumphs are chronicled in a chilling, sometimes overly dramatized account reminiscent of And the Band Played On.

From the Publisher

"Compelling, moving...[To Dance with the Devil]...will be compared to And the Band Played On....interweav[ing] policy and biography, cold science and heartbreaking reality."
--The New York Times Book Review

"To Dance with the Devil is a stunning piece of work: an absolutely lucid, entirely absorbing, and meticulously reported exploration of culture and politics at the cutting edge of medicine."
-- Joan Didion

"Karen Stabiner's book reads like a gripping adventure novel, with the pain and politics of breast cancer as protagonist. It even has a surprise finish, although the present cold, stark reality of this disease preclues the unambiguous ending we all so fervently hope for."
-- Joanna Bull, Founder and Executive Director, Gilda's Club, Cancer Support Community

About this edition

• Publisher: Delacorte Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0385312849
• ISBN 13: 9780385312844
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 544