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The Great Secret: The Classified World War II Disaster that Launched the War on Cancer
Maybe someday
29
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
40/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Jennet Conant
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
September 8, 2020
The story of a chemical weapons catastrophe, the cover-up, and how one American Army doctor's discovery led to the development of the first drug to combat cancer, known today as chemotherapy.
What The Reviewers Say
Well-researched and thoughtful.... A fast-paced read for fans of narrative nonfiction..
... splendid.
In the hands of an accomplished writer like Conant, this real-life scenario — and resulting disaster — offers great, if awful, promise.
Ms. Conant tends to go on tangents, which distracts from an otherwise compelling narrative, and the book has rather too much medical jargon for the lay reader. But she never wavers from her central thesis: that the Bari victims were unconscionably harmed by a conspiracy of silence and obfuscation among American and British officials, all the way up to Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower.
