The Emperor of All Maladies

From a cancer physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES is a stunning combination of medical history, cutting edge science, and narrative journalism that transforms our understanding of cancer and much of the world around us. Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist′s precision, a novelist′s richness of detail, a historian′s range, and a biographer′s passion.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance, paternalism, and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all out "war against cancer." It′s a story of science and scientists, of centuries of discoveries, of setbacks and victories and deaths, told through the eyes of Mukherjee′s predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary.

From the Persian Queen Atossa who instructed her Greek slave to cut off her malignant breast to the radical surgeries of the nineteenth century, to the first recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy, to Mukherjee′s own leukemia patient, Carla, THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALDIES is a story of people -- and their families -- who soldier through toxic, bruising, and draining regimens to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.

Riveting and magisterial, THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

About the Author

Siddhartha Mukherjee M.D., Ph.D., is a cancer physician and researcher. He is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at the CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital. A Rhodes Scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and from Harvard Medical School and was a Fellow at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and an attending physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has published articles in Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Neuron, the Journal of Clinical Investigation, The New York Times, and The New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter.