The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

About this book

Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Winner of the Pulitzer Prize adapted as a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS this New York Times bestseller is an extraordinary achievement (The New Yorker)a magnificent profoundly humane biography of cancer. Physician researcher and award-winning science writer Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologists precision a historians perspective and a biographers passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived withand perished fromfor more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity resilience and perseverance but also of hubris paternalism and misperception. 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. Riveting urgent and surprising The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.