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