While The Emperor of All Maladies is rich with the science and history behind the fight against cancer, it is also a meditation on illness, medical ethics, and the complex, intertwining lives of doctors and patients.

An exhaustive account of cancer's origins, The Emperor of All Maladies illustrates how modern treatments-multi-pronged chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, as well as preventative care-came into existence thanks to a century's worth of research, trials, and small, essential breakthroughs around the globe. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.Īmazon Best Books of the Month, November 2010: 'In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans, and more than 7 million humans around the world, will die of cancer.' With this sobering statistic, physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee begins his comprehensive and eloquent 'biography' of one of the most virulent diseases of our time. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. 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.įrom 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. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception.

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. 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. 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.

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