The Emperor of All Maladies
A Biography of Cancer
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- USD 16.99
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- USD 16.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—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.
Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjee’s new book Song of the Cell!
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.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Meet the face of one of humanity’s most insidious enemies in Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of cancer. Mukherjee takes us on a journey from stories of untreatable masses recorded in ancient Egypt and Greece to early physicians attempting to treat the “black bile” they thought caused cancer (often doing more harm than good) to modern heroes of oncological research like Dr. Sidney Farber, whose revolutionary work on chemotherapy saved millions of lives. Mukherjee’s knack for explaining complicated concepts in simple terms makes even the most scientific aspects of this story easy to understand. We loved the book’s many compelling stories of individual patients, doctors, and even marketers—like the geniuses behind the Jimmy Fund campaign, which took the fight against cancer into people’s homes. In a world where cancer touches all of us directly or indirectly, this is an absolute must-listen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mukherjee's debut book is a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy. From the first chemotherapy developed from textile dyes to the possibilities emerging from our understanding of cancer cells, Mukherjee shapes a massive amount of history into a coherent story with a roller-coaster trajectory: the discovery of a new treatment surgery, radiation, chemotherapy followed by the notion that if a little is good, more must be better, ending in disfiguring radical mastectomy and multidrug chemo so toxic the treatment ended up being almost worse than the disease. The first part of the book is driven by the obsession of Sidney Farber and philanthropist Mary Lasker to find a unitary cure for all cancers. (Farber developed the first successful chemotherapy for childhood leukemia.) The last and most exciting part is driven by the race of brilliant, maverick scientists to understand how cells become cancerous. Each new discovery was small, but as Mukherjee, a Columbia professor of medicine, writes, "Incremental advances can add up to transformative changes." Mukherjee's formidable intelligence and compassion produce a stunning account of the effort to disrobe the "emperor of maladies."
