The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

· Simon and Schuster
4.8
34 reviews
Ebook
592
Pages
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About this ebook

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and 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—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.

Now includes an excerpt from Siddhartha Mukherjees new book Song of the Cell!

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 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, 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.

Ratings and reviews

4.8
34 reviews
Paul Demetre
June 10, 2019
I would generally classify this as an extensive history of cancer research and treatment up to its writing date of 2010. Many of the stories told in this book is of failures and small victories, the persistence of both the disease and those trying to cure it, a fight they continues to this day. There is a lot in this volume to take in so have your thinking cap on.
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Rix Morales
November 4, 2017
The book put into perspective not just the medical aspect of cancer diseases but also the pure, raw and unfilled human experience about this most dreaded disease
2 people found this review helpful
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Uki D. Lucas
May 23, 2016
Thank you for writing a great book. Please enable text to speech, most of regular ebooks support it these days.
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About the author

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell,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. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com.

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