Riveting, urgent, and surprising, this is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer. 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 on through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease. The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers. Mukherjee, an Indian-American oncologist and author, received a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for the 2010 work. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Gene: An Intimate History, a 1 New York Times bestseller The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction and The Laws of Medicine.He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, is nothing less than an account of the 4,000-year quest to understand and treat cancer, a malady that continues to plague us over the centuries. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with-and perished from-for more than 5000 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. 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.

The emperor of all maladies