Description
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Paperback
by Mukherjee, Siddhartha
- Publisher : Fourth Estate Ltd (2011), Edition: First Edition, 616 pages
- Language : English
- Paperback :
- ISBN-10 : 7250924
- ISBN-13 : 9780007250929
- Weight : 0.438
- Dimensions : 21.06×3.91×14.1 cm
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 perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.
Reviews
4.3 rating based on 112,245 ratings (all editions)
ISBN-10: 0007250924
ISBN-13: 9780007250929
Goodreads: 40493814
Author(s):
Published: //2017
A Biography of Cancer
The story of cancer is a human one - a tale of chance discoveries, seized opportunities and human endurance. From innovative but brutal early surgical treatments to the Curies' ultimately tragic work with radiation; from Sidney Farber's hugely risky discovery of chemotherapy to the author's treatment of his own patients, this riveting book recounts a centuries-long conflict.
Now, as cancer becomes an ever more universal experience, the need to understand it, and its treatment, has never been more compelling. In this groundbreaking account Siddhartha Mukherjee, bestselling author of The Gene, reveals how far we have come in solving one of science's great mysteries and offers a facinating glimpse of our future progress.
(back cover)
