Dr. Otis Webb Brawley is an oncologist at a large public hospital in Atlanta and has been chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society since 2007. He is very disillusioned by what he sees as the enormous disparities in both access to and the quality of medical care in this country.

He believes this is because of ignorance, intellectual laziness, even greed on the part of individual doctors who practice substandard medicine; professional medical societies and the pharmaceutical industry; and regulatory bodies that simply are not doing their jobs.

"[N]o incident of failure in American medicine should be dismissed as an aberration,'' writes Brawley. "Failure is the system, and those of us who are not yet its victims are at high risk of being sucked into its turbines.''

Read the full review here at the bostonglobe.com