The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

His intensely vivid and precise descriptions of biological processes accumulate into a character, fully developed and eerily familiar. 'Mukherjee calls this great and beautiful book a biography, rather than a history, because he wants his reader to understand his subject not just as a disease, a scientific problem or a social condition, but as a character - an antagonist with a story to tell. Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers ISBN: 9780007250929 Number of pages: 400 Weight: 430 g Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 38 mm MEDIA REVIEWS 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. 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.įrom 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.

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'. 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. 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. Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2011 Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction 2011 Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee