Winner of the
Pulitzer Prize, and now a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, The
Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane
“biography” of cancer—from its first documented appearances
thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth
century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new
understanding of its essence.
Physician,
researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee
examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a
historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result
is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans
have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand
years.
The story of cancer
is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also
of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts
centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told
through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits
against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades
ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against
cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the
protagonist.
From the Persian
Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased breast,
to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and
chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The
Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered
through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive—and to
increase our understanding of this iconic disease.
Riveting, urgent,
and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating
glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating
book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify
cancer.