Emperor of All Maladies

A labor of love ... as comprehensive as possible. --George Canellos, M.D., William Rosenberg Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School It's hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion. The Emperor of All Maladies is an extraordinary achievement. --The New Yorker With this riveting and moving book, Siddhartha Mukherjee joins the first rank of those rare doctor-authors who can wield a pen as gracefully as a scalpel: Jerome Groopman, Atul Gawande, Richard Selzer. A magisterial, wise, and deeply human piece of writing. --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains The Emperor of All Maladies beautifully describes the nature of cancer from a patient's perspective and how basic research has opened the door to understanding this disease. --Bert Vogelstein, Director, Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins University A compulsively readable, surprisingly uplifting and vivid tale. --O, the Oprah Magazine An elegant ... tour de force. The Emperor of All Maladies reads like a novel ... but it deals with real people and real successes, as well as with the many false notions and false leads. Not only will the book bring cancer research and cancer biology to the lay public, it will help attract young researchers to a field that is at once exciting and heart wrenching ... and important. -- Donald Berry, Ph.D., Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas It's time to welcome a new star in the constellation of great writer-doctors. With this fat, enthralling, juicy, scholarly, wonderfully written history of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee vaults into that exalted company, inviting comparisons to ... Lewis Thomas and ... Stephen Jay Gould. --Washington Post Rarely have the science and poetry of illness been so elegantly braided together as they are in this erudite, engrossing, kind book. Mukherjee's clinical wisdom never erases the personal tragedies which are its occasion; indeed, he locates with meticulous clarity and profound compassion the beautiful hope buried in cancer's ravages. --Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon Sid Mukherjee's book is a pleasure to read, if that is the right word. Cancer today is widely regarded as the worst of all the diseases from which one might suffer -- if only because it is fast becoming the most common. Dr. Mukherjee explains how this perception came about, how cancer has been regarded across the years and what is now being done to treat its protean forms. His book is the clearest account I have read on this subject. With The Emperor of All Maladies, he joins that small fraternity of practicing doctors who can not just talk about their profession but write about it. --Tony Judt, author of Postwar and Ill Fares the Land Siddhartha Mukherjee has done something that should not have been possible: he has managed, at once, to write an authoritative history of cancer for the general reader, while always keeping the experiences of cancer patients in his heart and in his narrative. At once learned and skeptical, unsentimental and humane, The Emperor of all Maladies is that rarest of things--a noble book. --David Rieff, author of Swimming in a Sea of Death