Cancer Chronicle

It is the golden era of cancer writing. Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks was a bestseller in 2010, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s magisterial Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer won the Pulitzer in 2011 and this year we have When Breath Becomes Air by the late Paul Kalanithi, who was a 34-year-old non-smoking neurosurgeon when he developed lung cancer.

The science journalist Alanna Mitchell’s admirable Malignant Metaphor: Confronting Cancer Myths joins this series of thoughtful writings about the most reviled disease. Mitchell examines the idea of cancer and its reviling and, in it, she gets to the core of its ­importance.

As she points out, cancer is not exploding. Except in North America, its varied forms, even taken together, are not the most common cause of death...