When I was doing my medical training nearly 20 years ago, there were two kinds of residents: those who were planning on specializing in oncology and those who couldn’t tolerate the subject for even a month. One night when I was on call, I worked with someone in the second camp. He told me about a patient of his, an elderly woman with pancreatic cancer that had grown into her bile duct and metastasized through her intestinal tract. She had been through several rounds of chemotherapy without success and was ready to quit treatment, but was afraid to tell her oncologist. “She told me, ‘I don’t want him to think I’m giving up,’” my colleague said, obviously disgusted that she didn’t feel comfortable speaking freely about her goals.

He encouraged her to choose hospice care. Two weeks later, he said to me, his patient’s hospice aide came up to him on the ward. “She told me that my patient made her promise that the day she died, she would come find me and tell me. She said my patient wanted to thank me for encouraging her to die the way she wanted to.”

I thought of this story at various points while reading “The Death of Cancer,” Vincent DeVita Jr.’s fascinating if hubristically titled new book, co-authored with his daughter, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, a science writer. Today, more than four after President Nixon declared war on cancer and with so many new weapons in our arsenal supported by big budgets and a decidedly aggressive posture, when is it O.K. to give up? When is it best ?

DeVita himself has been one of the top commanders in this war. He was in the vanguard of chemotherapists, engineering the first cure for Hodgkin’s disease and diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Later, he was director of the National Cancer Institute, physician in chief at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan and president of the American Cancer Society.

In DeVita’s telling, we are winning this war. Childhood leukemias are now almost completely curable. Death rates for almost all types of cancers are steadily decreasing. We have an array of new biological molecules and immunotherapies that put the old slash-and-burn cancer drugs to shame. When he says, “We have the tools to eradicate cancer,” he is someone we should listen to.

At this point many doctors would advocate a purely palliative approach, but not DeVita. Early in his career, he writes, he learned a “profound” lesson: “never to give up on anyone.” He finds another treatment, an experimental vaccine and a monoclonal antibody, but Lee has severe side effects. He is then put into another study, but the experimental treatment fails to achieve remission. By then the cancer has spread to his lungs and bones. He is given another experimental drug but develops severe diarrhea as a side effect. He becomes dehydrated and has to be admitted to the hospital, where an oncologist decides to try another combination of drugs, a decision DeVita calls “courageous.”

Lee’s cancer is kept at bay for almost a year, but it recurs with a vengeance. However, DeVita isn’t done. He tries to get Lee one more experimental drug, abiraterone, but the company that manufactures it and guidelines from the Food and Drug Administration refuse to allow it to be used in patients with prostate cancer that is so far advanced. Without further options, Lee is finally admitted into hospice care and dies two weeks later at home. “It was awful to watch,” DeVita writes. “I kept thinking about the treatments Lee didn’t get.”

Despite my uneasiness with DeVita’s take-no-prisoners strategy, I thoroughly enjoyed his book. He gives an authoritative review of the history of surgery and radiation therapy. His depictions of the behind-the-scenes search for new cancer drugs and the turf wars between radiation, surgical and medical oncologists are dishy and fascinating. He tells many poignant anecdotes, like one about a 10-year-old cancer patient who gives DeVita a 50-cent piece because he puts in her intravenous line on the first try. Ultimately, DeVita ably shows that the development of oncology as a modern specialty is a very human story.

But in the end I would have liked to see more about palliative care: when to give up the good fight. In the case of his friend, DeVita writes that a study published two years after Lee died showed that patients with advanced prostate cancer treated with abiraterone were living longer. He calls it a “near miss” — if Lee had lived two more years, he could have been one of those patients. But he doesn’t mention that the abiraterone-treated patients lived only 3.9 months longer than they otherwise would have.