Mukherjee 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.
... a story of pioneers and mavericks; of serendipity, risk-taking and wild leaps of faith; of meetings of minds that changed medical history and obsessive experiments conducted in solitude ... feels like essential reading ... The full palette of human nature is revealed here ... The book's six sections are well-balanced, spread between medical strides of the past, more recent challenges, case studies, and current research. It is heartening, and daunting, to read of our deeper understanding of the cancer cell's biological make-up ... De-mystifying the disease, rendering the science accessible, and wearing respect for the patients uppermost, The Emperor of All Maladies is the book that many will have been waiting for. This elegantly written overview allows us to look a once whispered-about illness squarely in the eye.
Few books deftly yet thoroughly cover a wide range of topics in a single volume ... Dr. Mukherjee gracefully discusses the development of early chemotherapeutic agents, the first clinical trials, and the changing standards of surgical care for women with breast cancer. Paralleling the increasing importance of understanding cancer cell characterization in research, Dr. Mukherjee describes the discovery of the key cancer cell properties that many researchers may now take for granted. Critical connections and conclusions are carefully described, and each discovery is treated with care and respect. No part of this book is boring or dry; Dr. Mukherjee leads the reader through a masterful discussion using engaging, interesting language, which often borders on the poetic ... readers will feel what can be imagined to be only a fraction of the pain and hope/hopelessness of cancer patients and their families, and will feel excitement, amazement, and respect at the lengths that cancer research has taken over the past few decades ... an amazing, definitive, intelligent book.
The eminently readable result is a weighty tale of an enigma that has remained outside the grasp of both the people who endeavored to know it and those who would prefer never to have become acquainted with it ... Alas, this is not a posthumous biography, but it is nonetheless a surprisingly accessible and encouraging narrative.
With epic scope and passionate pen, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer boldly addresses, then breaks down the monolith of disease and its public face from ancient Egyptian care to gene-resistant trial therapies ... Mukherjee incorporates strands of patient histories, but his extensive knowledge of the disease and exuberance for the scientific developments on the path sometimes blots out the human cost of such experimentation; his sensitive treatment of activism among metastatic breast-cancer patients gives their struggle a platform as well as a historical justification for their protests ... A biography without an ending by the author’s own admission, The Emperor Of All Maladies does provide a tempered hope for advances in understanding that will fuel future discoveries.
... remarkable ... [Mukherjee] is extraordinarily good at explaining complex medical and scientific issues and controversies ... Science and medicine, like all human endeavors, are driven by the knowledge, intelligence, ambitions and egos of the people involved, and Mukherjee presents lively thumbnail portraits of doctors and researchers and of the battles that engaged them. He writes vividly of the political struggles to fund cancer research and to limit known carcinogens like tobacco. He quotes poets, philosophers and writers, particularly Susan Sontag, and he writes with empathy about the experiences of his own patients. All of this makes The Emperor of All Maladies not just an exceptional work in the history of science but a fine example of literary nonfiction ... Mukherjee makes a large contribution to a better general understanding of this dread disease.
The story, [Mukherjee] promises, is one of hubris, arrogance, paternalism, misperception, false hope and hype. Dr. Mukherjee delivers on that promise and more—at times it seems like too much more. He takes several detours into well-trod territory, such as the emergence of AIDS and its influence on patient activism, that distract from the primary story: how centuries of study have led to an era of understanding, prevention and treatment that has seen a reduction in both the incidence of cancer and the death rates from the four most common cancers ... Though Dr. Mukherjee has a storyteller's flair and a gift for translating complex medical concepts into simple language, he occasionally reverts to jargon so dense that the lay reader may feel overwhelmed. Yet The Emperor of All MaladiesRead Full Review >>
... powerful and ambitious ... an epic story that [Mukherjee] seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan ... a history of eureka moments and decades of despair ... Mukherjee stitches stories of his own patients into this history, not always smoothly. But they are very strong, well-written and unsparing of himself.
Just as you feel Mukherjee has affection even for the coldest and most arrogant of the cancer pioneers, so you sense his fascination with the dreaded disease itself. While his concern for his patients – and in particular Carla, whose leukaemia becomes one of the central motifs of the book – is real and feelingly described, it takes second place to his fascination with the behaviour of the cancer, which 'explodes' out of their cells, and to the cat and mouse game that science has had to play to try to find ways to stop it in its tracks. Perhaps it is his own feeling for the disease that makes this Pulitzer prize-winning book so readable – at the same time an encyclopedic history of scientific progress against history and ripping yarn.
Mukherjee conveys the emotional burden carried by a cancer specialist whose daily routine brings him close to people who may be about to die ... This blood-and-guts volume is brightened by a handsome photograph of the oncologist looking like a Bollywood film star. Yet his book, though named by The New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2010, is not an easy read, especially for the British eye. Its scientific explanations are interposed awkwardly and its pages spattered with abbreviations such as VAMP, CML and GIST and indigestible phrases such as 'myc, neu, fos, et, akt are all oncogenes, while ‘VHL’ and ‘APC’ are tumour suppressors'. The book is unashamedly American in origin, spelling and statistics. We are told at the start that 'in 2010, about 600,000 Americans, and more than seven million humans around the world, will die of cancer'. n its historical sweep, however, the book succeeds.
... captures the excitement of biomedical research and discovery, the wonder at the complexities of cancer and the bodies it inhabits, and the thrill of major advances in knowledge and practice ... an ambitious intellectual, social and cultural history of this murderous, shape-shifting companion, and of efforts to understand and control it. He brings recent historical scholarship to a broader audience, interweaves it with his own experience as a physician, and adds his own research on more recent developments in cancer. It has limitations, however: it focuses on the US rather than Europe, on developments after the Second World War not before it, and on biological causes. Mukherjee has little interest in environmental or lifestyle causes of cancer; he gives only a brief mention of the struggles over tobacco that followed epidemiological evidence in the 1940s and 1950s of a link between smoking and lung cancer ... his account of therapeutic interventions is selective. He tells us much more about chemotherapy and surgery than about radiotherapy. Yet radiotherapy was the major alternative and supplement to surgery for almost half a century before chemotherapy ... He also downplays the importance of efforts to get public support for anti-cancer campaigns.
... a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy ... Mukherjee shapes a massive amount of history into a coherent story with a roller-coaster trajectory ... Mukherjee's formidable intelligence and compassion produce a stunning account of the effort to disrobe the 'emperor of maladies.'
