TO DANCE WITH THE DEVIL: The New War on Breast Cancer, Politics, Power, and People.<i> By Karen Stabiner</i> .<i> Delacorte Press: 518 pp., $25.95</i>

Breast cancer is the devil’s toy. It is capricious, ruthless and as of this writing, still out of control. I know this first hand. Nearly five years ago on a perfect June morning, I sat across from a kindly doctor who started lobbing unmentionable words to me. “Tumor.” “Chemotherapy.” “Mastectomy.” “Reconstruction.” In seconds, my sunny world went dark and ugly. My husband, whose kindness and quick wit help keep my world bright, slumped in his chair, his jaw slack. There were no words.

We had crossed over into a world that made no promises and cut no slack for kind intentions or diligent behavior. It was an invasive world--one that would dominate my body, our psyches and bank accounts for the months and years ahead. Like the nearly 200,000 women diagnosed each year, I was launched into the world of breast cancer with no context and grim expectations. I needed a mentor and I needed one fast. My life depended on it.

That afternoon, through the urging of friends, I bought “Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book.” Suddenly, I had a guide in this new wilderness, someone who sanely and compassionately laid out the whole story. And for the first time in that endless scary day, I felt hope.

To say that she saved my life would be an overstatement. But to say that she made bearable and less terrifying the ordeal that lay ahead is not, and for that I will always be indebted to her.

So I came to Karen Stabiner’s book, “To Dance With the Devil,” eager to learn more about the nether-world that I just entered and Love had documented well.

No doubt about it, Stabiner has taken on the devil in this exhaustively researched, dogged epic of a war zone--the UCLA Breast Center--from January 1994 to July 1996.

As everyone knows by now, modern medicine is primarily about money. And politics. And power. And, oh yes, people. So it follows that a book about contemporary medical warfare would have a plot as complicated as the Pentagon and a cast of characters as long and diverse as a Robert Altman movie.

Let’s start with the star of this epic. Susan Love grew up in suburban New Jersey--one of five children. She entered a convent in Manhattan in the 1960s, fully intending to become a nun. Disappointed in her inability to find peace there, she confided to a former teacher, Sister Inez, that she didn’t feel up to the task. “God does not want you to be crazy,” said Sister Inez, who advised her to find some other way to do good in the world.

So Love went on to medical school and became the first female general surgeon on Boston’s Beth Israel faculty when she was only 32. There, she “. . . announced to anyone who cared to listen that she was far too talented to settle for the ghetto of women’s medicine.” God is probably still having the last laugh on that.

Still, the doctors at Beth Israel kept referring breast cases to her--assuming a woman surgeon would be interested in women patients. The women sought her out because she was a woman, but also because she listened. As her caseload grew, she found she was not only swamped, she was also indispensable. And for a person who had always considered herself a misfit, this was a very big deal. In 1982, she became a consulting surgeon at the Dana Farber Hospital Breast Evaluation Center in Boston, and as the controversy between mastectomies and lumpectomies heated up, Love became an outspoken crusader for the less traumatic, breast-conserving surgery.

Through her contact with patients, Love learned firsthand how terrified most women were to question their doctors about breast cancer. In 1986, she started writing her breast cancer book. Published in 1990, it is still the first book most women turn to after the diagnosis.

Six years and one exhaustive book tour later, Love was offered another chance to do good in the world. The women she met on her book tour made it clear that it was now time for a national dialogue to begin. “It was so clear: The time had come to politicize breast cancer. Rather than complain, she could lead the way out.”

AIDS activism had taught the gals in the breast cancer movement that waiting politely for the government to dole out research money wasn’t going to work. As Stabiner writes, “It was time to make noise.”

As Love became more public, her supervisors at the Farber (and later at UCLA) accused her of irresponsible behavior. They complained that she let her politics interfere with her practice. Many colleagues scorned her for “being outspoken, female, gay, a troublemaker,” according to Stabiner.

Then, there was the escalating toll managed health care was taking on her patients who were denied treatment and doctors who couldn’t afford to give patients the treatment they needed. In 1988, Love opened the Faulkner Breast Center in Boston. After less than four years at Faulkner, she accepted a job as the director of a new breast cancer program at UCLA.

As Stabiner describes Love, she is an original: brilliant, unbridled, egotistical, compassionate and contradictory--perfect material for a book. I worry that some misguided editor told Stabiner that Love was not enough, that she should flesh out her story with more characters. And flesh she does.

The cast of characters includes 26 clinicians (including Love); eight researchers (including several who were racing to be the first to identify the BRCA-1 gene--the inherited gene that causes approximately 5% of breast cancer cases); five government officials (including Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala; five philanthropists (including Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Ronald Perelman); three advocates and lobbyists (including lawyer and breast cancer survivor Fran Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition, who lobbied tirelessly for more research money); and seven patients whom we follow from diagnosis to surgery, treatment and in one case to death. Plus, there are cameo appearances by Barbra Streisand, President and Hillary Clinton, Antonio Banderas, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Here’s a story that has everything: mystery, heroes, villains, life, death, hope and great anecdotes. Pick a narrative, any narrative, and you have a pretty compelling structure for this subject. But by telling each person’s story, documenting each piece of research and legislation, Stabiner has managed to neutralize the inherent drama and wear the reader out before he or she can fully appreciate the shattering tale being told here.

The book ends in 1996. By this time, Love, Visco and the other crusaders have turned breast cancer into a trendy, A-list event. During “Fashion Week” of October 1994, designers used their clothes to raise money and awareness; Ralph Lauren designed the bulls-eye “Fashion Targets Breast Cancer” T-shirt. President Clinton had declared breast cancer research a “high priority for this administration,” the same designation AIDS research has, and the breast cancer research budget had nearly tripled.

The managed-care revolt that began when Love was in private practice went into spin cycle with the ignominious defeat of Clinton’s health care reform package in 1994. In a postscript, Stabiner tells us that “By the time Love began her salary negotiations for fiscal 1997 . . . business owned medicine.” And by the end of the postscript, Love has quit the UCLA center to go for a master’s in business and “learn to speak business” and write a book on menopause.

This is a book of good intention and exhaustive research. But its muddled organization and often alarming anecdotal material just add fear and confusion to a subject that really doesn’t need any more of either. When one patient, Barbara Rubin, refuses conventional treatment and turns to guru Ram Dass and alternative therapies, all we know by the end of the book is that she “had come to believe absolutely in the connection between the mind and the body--in her ability to heal herself--and if someone like Susan Love required more data, well, that was what being a Western doctor was all about. Barbara did not require any more proof.” Yes, but we the readers do.

And when one of her patients has a nipple discharge “the color of Jack Daniels,” Love dismisses it with a brusque, “Oh, I don’t care about that,” and that’s the last we hear of it. Call me an alarmist--but I care, and I would have liked to know what it was.

Oncologists treat breast cancer by bombarding the disease with an arsenal of chemotherapies, radiology, experimental drugs and extreme treatments like bone marrow transplants. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. Treating cancer is a crapshoot. It’s also an apt metaphor for this unruly book. And like the disease itself, this book runs the gamut from terrifying to mollifying, including everything you need to know. And probably a little more.

KAREN STABINER will participate in the panel “Politics of Women’s Health” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, April 20, at 11 a.m.