The Secret History of the War on Cancer
By Devra Davis
Basic Books £15.99, 550 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.99

As an epidemiologist and the director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh, Devra Davis is certainly qualified to write The Secret History of the War on Cancer. “I believe,” she writes, “that if we had acted on what has long been known about the industrial and environmental causes of cancer when this war first began, at least a million and a half lives could have been spared.”