The Emperor of All Maladies

A comprehensive history of cancer – one of the greatest enemies of medical progress – and an insight into its effects and potential cures, by a leading expert on the illness. In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, 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, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out ‘war against cancer’. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteeth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge. Riveting and magesterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

About the Author :
Siddhartha Mukherjee M.D., Ph.D., is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and from Harvard Medical School and was a Fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and an attending physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.

Review :
‘A riveting book … Profound, eloquent and searching’ Sunday Times ‘Masterly … at the same time an encyclopedic history of scientific progress against history and a ripping yarn’ Guardian ‘The notion of "popular science" doesn't come close to describing this achievement. It is literature’ Observer ‘The book that many will have been waiting for. This elegantly written overview allows us to look a once whispered-about illness squarely in the eye’ Independent ‘So beautifully written; this is literature, not popular science’ Evening Standard ‘Mukherjee never condescends, yet he manages to write lucidly and tellingly about complex experimental, technological and theoretical matters’ Will Self, New Statesman ‘Powerful and ambitious … One of the most extraordinary stories in medicine’ New York Times Book Review ‘What a story – full of quixotic characters, therapeutic triumphs and setbacks, and recent historical events – with all the hubris and pathos of Greek tragedy’ Washington Post ‘It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion’ New Yorker ‘Mukherjee brings an impressive balance of empathy and dispassion to this instantly essential piece of medical journalism’ Time ‘Now and then a writer comes along who helps us fathom both the intricacies of a scientific specialty and its human meaning. Lewis Thomas, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sacks come to mind. Add to their company Siddhartha Mukherjee’ Elle ‘Rich and engrossing … With the perceptiveness and patience of a true scientist, [Mukherjee] begins to weave these individual threads into a coherent and engrossing narrative’ Economist ‘A meticulously researched, panoramic history … [Mukherjee] imbues decades of painstaking laboratory investigation with the suspense of a mystery novel and urgency of a thriller’ Boston Globe