mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

After the events of The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest, this conclusion to the trilogy expands the perspective on the Earth-Trisolaran conflict beyond our two petty solar systems to a galactic, interdimensional, and finally universal scale. (Yes, this is the sort of book where rather than wondering if your favorite character survives, you wonder instead if there will be a habitable universe for them to survive in by the last page.)

This book took me a long time to read, not only because it's 600 pages but also because I kept stopping due to real life distractions. I also don't have the book anymore because it had to go back to the library. So I'm afraid this post is going to be more vibes-based than going into a ton of detail, even though seventy million things happened in the book that would each be worthy of detailed discussion.

My ultimate impression of the book (and of the series as a whole) is that there are a lot of things that the author and I will just never see eye-to-eye on, but I don't mind setting that aside because I like the way he explores his ideas even if I disagree with their fundamental basis.

( cut for length )

[This is a revision of a review I first posted to 50books_poc on August 3rd, 2011. It has been edited for clarity.]

This book chronicles the history of cancer diagnosis and treatment from antiquity to the present day, and for being a fairly long book it was a damn quick read for me, because every bit of it was interesting. I was constantly looking for excuses to pick up the book and find out what would happen next. I learned an extraordinary number of things about cancer that I had no idea about before, particularly the latest theories on how it functions on a genetic level.

Mukherjee, who is an oncologist, has the gift of making science easy to understand without reducing it to vague analogies. The book is highly readable, though with a puzzling overuse of epigraphs—several per chapter heading and section division produces up to five paragraph-long epigraphs in a row, in some cases!

I appreciated the detailed treatment of cultural views of cancer in the West, how it went from a forbidden, shameful topic to something we have marches and public demonstrations about. I also didn't know about the parallels and interrelationships with the fight for recognition of AIDS and its associated research.

It will come as no surprise that there are parts of the book that may be disturbing, though the parts that disturbed me the most weren't the ones I expected. The hardest part for me to read was how the connection between tobacco and cancer has been deliberately concealed out of greed.

This is not any kind of a light read, but I think it is a worthy one. I recommend it to anyone whose life has been affected by cancer, which, of course, is nearly all of us.