A Commotion in the Blood: Life, Death, and the Immune System (Sloan Technology)

"To anyone who writes about science or medicine ... the word breakthrough has a kind of transcendent power." It is to Stephen Hall's credit that he avoids the B-word in A Commotion in the Blood. Hall recounts the "manic-depressive history" of immune therapies for cancer without, said Roy Porter, "the futile pretense that the great cancer 'magic bullet' will be there as the new millennium dawns." Fred Rosen, in Nature magazine, calls A Commotion in the Blood "a wonderful book for lay readers who want to know more about current biomedical science ... replete with scientific details recounted in very comprehensible prose."