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 & award-winning science writer examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision a historian's perspective & a biographer's passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid & eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with
- & perished from
- for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity resilience & perseverance but also of hubris arrogance & 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 & deaths told through the eyes of predecessors & 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 & chemotherapy & Mukherjee's own leukemia patient Carla The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic bruising & draining regimes to survive & to increase the store of human knowledge. Riveting & magesterial The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments & a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors scientists philosophers & lay people have observed & understood the human body for millennia.