Customer Reviews

Stopping Cancer at the Source

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I teach a course on environmental health and have found this book to be an excellent resource for my students. Although this book was originally intended (I'm sure) as a book for ordinary consumers, I think it's best utilized as a teaching aid in health promotion. It's difficult to find good current resources in this area, and this book compliments widely-used, tried and true titles such as Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson.

The book does a good job explaining how cancer starts and what factors are needed to give cancer the boost it needs to inhabit your body at the cellular level. It explains ways to prevent cancer and the simple things we can do to become activists against such a deadly disease. This book seems to be written for an audience of 9th grade, making it very easy to understand.

I purchases the unrevised version from 2001, but this review applies to the other book as well, which is mostly the same, just with addittional topics and all updated studies.

Realize that this woman has her PhD in sociology and bioethics, so her explanations on highly intricate scientific precesses are not always the most accurate. While her simple use of language makes the topic easy to understand, it is often oversimplified, and can lead the reader astray with incorrect presumptions. This book was used as a supplement to many others in my Inquiry Seminar class at college, where the professor, who specializes in the natural sciences was able to clarify where Rosenthal was slightly off base.

Another frustration was the repititition of what the all of us can do to help, such as write to local legislature etc. It was overdone, and the tone was made it sound so simple, when in reality, the process is much more complex.

Overall, it offers a good sampling of a variety of topics and is a good discussion starter, but should not be relied upon for accurate scientific explanations.

This book is the synopsis of a Canadian gov't study. 'nuf said?
The author is on the stump for gov't controls, railing against everything from cigarettes to global warming. If you're at all concerned about cancer you will find:
a) nothing new in this book
b) nothing of value in this book
c) your high-school freshman daughter could have done better.