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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer Hardcover – November 16, 2010
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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 cut off her malignant 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.
- Reading age1 year and up
- Print length592 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Lexile measure1240L
- Dimensions6.13 x 2 x 9.25 inches
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateNovember 16, 2010
- ISBN-109781439107959
- ISBN-13978-1439107959
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"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. The Emperor of All Maladies is an extraordinary achievement.”—The New Yorker
“A compulsively readable, surprisingly uplifting and vivid tale.”—O, the Oprah Magazine
"With this riveting and moving book, Siddhartha Mukherjee joins the first rank of those rare doctor-authors who can wield a pen as gracefully as a scalpel: Jerome Groopman, Atul Gawande, Richard Selzer. A magisterial, wise, and deeply human piece of writing."--Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains
“An elegant … tour de force. The Emperor of All Maladies reads like a novel … but it deals with real people and real successes, as well as with the many false notions and false leads. Not only will the book bring cancer research and cancer biology to the lay public, it will help attract young researchers to a field that is at once exciting and heart wrenching ... and important.”-- Donald Berry, Ph.D., Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas
“Sid Mukherjee’s book is a pleasure to read, if that is the right word. Cancer today is widely regarded as the worst of all the diseases from which one might suffer -- if only because it is fast becoming the most common. Dr. Mukherjee explains how this perception came about, how cancer has been regarded across the years and what is now being done to treat its protean forms. His book is the clearest account I have read on this subject. With The Emperor of All Maladies, he joins that small fraternity of practicing doctors who can not just talk about their profession but write about it.”--Tony Judt, author of Postwar and Ill Fares the Land
“Siddhartha Mukherjee has done something that should not have been possible: he has managed, at once, to write an authoritative history of cancer for the general reader, while always keeping the experiences of cancer patients in his heart and in his narrative. At once learned and skeptical, unsentimental and humane, The Emperor of all Maladies is that rarest of things--a noble book.”--David Rieff, author of Swimming in a Sea of Death
“The Emperor of All Maladies beautifully describes the nature of cancer from a patient’s perspective and how basic research has opened the door to understanding this disease.” --Bert Vogelstein, Director, Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins University
“A labor of love … as comprehensive as possible.”--George Canellos, M.D., William Rosenberg Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
“Rarely have the science and poetry of illness been so elegantly braided together as they are in this erudite, engrossing, kind book. Mukherjee's clinical wisdom never erases the personal tragedies which are its occasion; indeed, he locates with meticulous clarity and profound compassion the beautiful hope buried in cancer's ravages.”--Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon
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Product details
- ASIN : 1439107955
- Publisher : Scribner; 1st edition (November 16, 2010)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 592 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9781439107959
- ISBN-13 : 978-1439107959
- Reading age : 1 year and up
- Lexile measure : 1240L
- Item Weight : 1.96 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.13 x 2 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #37,159 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #23 in Oncology (Books)
- #40 in History of Medicine (Books)
- #83 in Medical Professional Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author

Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbytarian Hospital. A former Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford (where he received a PhD studying cancer-causing viruses) and from Harvard Medical School. His laboratory focuses on discovering new cancer drugs using innovative biological methods. Mukherjee trained in cancer medicine at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute of Harvard Medical School and was on the staff at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He has published articles and commentary in such journals as Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron and the Journal of Clinical Investigation and in publications such as the New York Times and the New Republic. His work was nominated for Best American Science Writing, 2000 (edited by James Gleick). He lives in Boston and New York with his wife, Sarah Sze, an artist, and with his daughter, Leela.
His author website is www.siddharthamukherjee.me
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Mukherjee uses the same method, and as I was reading, I'd wonder about different ways to solve for a problem, before reading what scientists actually did. A book of this size could have been very heavy, but it was easy to stay interested, and I really enjoyed the literary analogies that were sprinkled throughout.
It's astonishing to learn how relatively new much of cancer knowledge is. I knew some things in the book, of course, but it covers many decades and many aspects (social and political, as well as scientific). I can't imagine how much work went into writing this book, and it's well worth reading. Don't let the length scare you--because of the way it's written, it's easy to put down and pick up again later. Well worth reading!
I just can't recommend this book highly enough. It really deserves 10 out of 5 stars. And it's not just because the book is so well researched and written, but mostly because Siddhartha Mukherjee takes the history and personalities involved, and creates a narrative that reads as much like a murder mystery as it does a book about scientific discovery, making this book a surprising page turner.
One thing to note is that while this book is already 10 years out of date, it's still a very valuable read, as the basic parameters of modern cancer care have not changed all that much in the last ten years, even if some of the drugs and therapies have.
The book is almost 500 pages long with the first 100 pages or so looks at its history, and the other 400 provides a detailed description of the research effort in the last 150 years. The research effort is wide and spans many areas, and it is very interesting to see the changes in the perception of the illness and possible treatments as research progresses. It is not far fetch to believe that people living in the year 2050 will look down at the primitive treatment that is currently available (that is in 2013).
Cancer is one of the most interesting illness and apparently one of the hardest to cure for two main reasons: The first being that fact that there are many different types. Where even within the same type (e.g. blood cancer), there are different subtypes that are classified by the difference in the mutated genes. The second reason is due to the fact that cancer cells are hard to target without harming the normal cells in the patient body. In other words, we're looking for a "smart" missile that will target only the evil cells.
The book provides a very interesting account of the creativity of the researchers in finding ways to deal with cancer. From traumatic operation that digs a large part of the body, to various toxics that kills every cells including the normal ones, and to the most recent advances in the molecular level that study specific genes (often muted) and tries to find a way to suppress their activity.
The book is highly interesting, (especially in its early parts) but my main criticism is that it is very *hard* book to read, almost frustratingly hard. Writing to a general audience is a skill that seems to be missing from the author (and editor) of this book. There are many popular science books on topics that are harder to explain (e.g. Quantum Physics), but for some reason this particular book seems to enjoy writing in a complex medical language for no reason. It tends to use complex medical terms that most readers (including me of course) do not fully understand. Moreover, even after encountering a complex medical term and understanding it once following a short internet search, they will probably won't remember it accurately in the next chapter. There is a short glossary at the end of the book, but I kept finding myself going to a nearby Internet connection to look for the meaning of various terms. For examples, "Carcinogenesis" (or Oncogenesis in other places), "Proto-oncogene", "Metastatic", and many others. The problem is getting worst in the last 100 pages, where without a descent knowledge in Biology and a good memory of the medical terms, you won't be able to understand the text in depth. I found myself very frustrated in that part of the book, as the reading became really cumbersome and not very enjoyable.
Anyway, for those we are willing to delve into the complex medical jargon, and do want to learn a great deal about Cancer, this book will meet their needs.
Cancer is one an extremely complex subject and this book makes wonders is explaining the evolution of this disease and the current status (up to the point when it was written) of this disease.
It was a complete and gratifying journey taken during the read of this book. Thank you for the opportunity of the ride!
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Highly recommended book.
This "Emperor of all Maladies", most thankfully, stays at a safe distance of this recent trend of simple and/or rushed books and is already a canonical and exemplary nonfiction treaty of one of the fiercest and more devastating of maladies. It is superb.
Everything works in this volume, because the author is an eminency in his field, but he is never patronizing or condescending. He never writes as from a pulpit nor tries to impress the reader with his obviously vast knowledge of the matter at hand. Importantly, Mr Mukherjee never (not once) falls for easy sentimentalism or tries to engage through pity - and falling for this would be easy in a book about cancer. The reader feels at all times that the author is a mere guide with an authoritative voice. And yet some moments do provoke the reader to cringe, almost to suffer: the patient that consols the doctor when all the options for a cure are exhausted; the process of dealing with the empty beds in a children's ward, among others, are parts hard to finish.
The prose is at all times pitch-perfect and never falters, even in a 400-plus science book. The voice of the author, and its language, are always clear, personal and sober.
The book works also at another level, that of the politics of tackling such a disease. The right way to fight the malady or how to fund the enormous efforts to do so, become long and vapid discussions between bureaucrats and, at points, decades are lost because of lack of focus, pure greed or pettiness. The science is there - since the Egyptians, who spotted the malady yet reached, in 2600 BC !, a shocking conclusion: "Cure? None".
This is a very good book that has already raised the bar of nonfiction.
this book shows our knowledge our attempts at curing cancer , our failure, the brave cancer volunteers for experiments and it all show that we are waging a war on cancer. it now early identification of cancer is our best shot for our survival.




















