ESTROGEN MATTERS: Why Taking Hormones in Menopause Can Improve Women’s Well-Being and Lengthen Their Lives—without Raising the Risk of Breast Cancer. Avrum Bluming, MD, and Carol Tavris, PhD. The book’s subtitle tells the story. Bluming, a medical oncologist, and Tavris, a social psychologist, return to the story of hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which helped women ease symptoms of menopause throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The therapy was largely abandoned after 2002 once the “Women’s Health Initiative” asserted, in what the authors call “a fear campaign,” that there’d been an uptick in breast cancer among women taking HRT. The authors track the convoluted history of this issue and present a compelling case for resurrecting HRT. They draw on laboratory research, studies of pregnant women, and survival data to show that it is time to reconsider the fears about HRT, showing its benefits far exceed the risks. Little, Brown, 2018, 320 pp., $27.00.