About this item
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.
About the Author
Lochlann Jain is an Associate Professor in Stanford's Anthropology department, where she teaches medical and legal anthropology.
Jain's first book, Injury (Princeton University Press, 2006) , analyzed injury as a civil rights issue and product liability law as a place to better understand how Americans value physical health. The book was praised as: "a first-rate work of critique" (American Bar Foundation) , "a provocative, sophisticated, and ambitious analysis" (Law & Politics Book Review) , and "an impressive feat of interdisciplinary scholarship" (American Anthropologist) .
Trained as an interdisciplinary scholar, Jain has used literature in oncology, law, history, and literature, as well as anthropology and memoir to analyze and explain how cancer has become definitive of life in the United States.
Jain is the recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the National Center for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Please see the book's website at:
www.malignant.us
