RaveThe GuardianMukherjee manages to convey not only a forensically precise picture of what he sees, but a shiver, too, of what he feels ... The yoking of scientific expertise to narrative talent is rare enough, but the literary echoes of The Emperor of All Maladies suggest a desire to go further even than fine, accessible explanation ... It takes some nerve to echo the first line of Anna Karenina and infer that the story of a disease is capable of bearing a Tolstoyan treatment. But that is, breathtakingly, what Mukherjee pulls off ... the scene is set for a monumental scientific, political and human struggle. Mukherjee assembles a teeming cast of characters: from ancients such as Atossa, the Persian queen who in 500BC self-prescribed the first recorded mastectomy, to Mukherjee\'s own patients. There are tales of grizzly surgical techniques and astonishing medical discoveries. But, as with any epic narrative, the central drama marches towards a war ... Mukherjee is doing more than providing an account of medical developments, scientific discovery and human suffering. The underlying structural dynamic of his book turns out to be the riddle of progress itself, the application of reason and science to chaos and disease – the uber-project of modernity that, even if it has achieved too much to be called a failure, can never finally succeed ... intensely vivid and precise descriptions of biological processes accumulate into a character, fully developed and eerily familiar. The notion of \'popular science\' doesn\'t come close to describing this achievement. It is literature.
