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Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011.
Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize 2011.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 2011.
A magnificent, beautifully written biography of cancer -- from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles to cure, control and conquer it, to a radical new understanding of its essence.
Author and academic Sarah Churchwell, who was on the judging panel, said: “The Emperor of All Maladies is a cultural history of cancer and its treatment, from its first identification as a disease in the ancient world to 21st century research into its cellular genesis and treatment.
“Siddhartha Mukherjee has marshalled an immense amount of material into a readable and inspiring story. The result is a gripping, enlightening read about the nature of illness and our battle against what begins to look like mortality itself.”
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The Emperor of All Maladies Synopsis
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE * A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 100 BOOK OF THE CENTURY * A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A TIME ALL-TIME 100 NONFICTION BOOK Updated with FOUR NEW MAJOR CHAPTERS illuminating the new developments in cancer detection, prevention, treatment, and understanding in the fifteen years since the book's first publication, this New York Times bestseller is "an extraordinary achievement" (The New Yorker)--a magnificent, profoundly humane "biography" of cancer.Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of All Maladies became an instant classic when it was published in 2010. A magnificent, humane "biography" of cancer--from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic 20th century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence--The Emperor of All Maladies is one of the most highly acclaimed books of its time. In the years since Mukherjee dazzled readers with The Emperor of All Maladies, much has changed in the universe of cancer--in our understanding of its causes; in our attempts to prevent it; and in the revolutionary new treatments. In four profound and revelatory new chapters--essentially a new book about cancer--he illuminates this disease with both a bird's eye view of the landscape and an acute focus on the role of the cell. He also looks at imminent new studies--and to the future. Riveting, audacious, and now more urgent than ever in this vast update, The Emperor of All Maladies is a masterpiece.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee Press Reviews
'Mukherjee calls this great and beautiful book a biography, rather than a history, because he wants his reader to understand his subject not just as a disease, a scientific problem or a social condition, but as a character -- an antagonist with a story to tell. His 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.'
Observer
'This is a riveting book - profound, eloquent and searching'
John Carey, Sunday Times
'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.' Independent
'So beautifully written; this is literature, not popular science. The Emperor of Maladies empowers us, makes it clear that we really do know this enemy, and so brings us another step closer to victory.' Evening Standard
'Mukherjee never condescends, yet he manages to write lucidly and tellingly about complex experimental, technological and theoretical matters' Will Self, New Statesman
'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
'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 cannot just talk about their profession butwrite about it.' Tony Judt, author of Postwar and III Fares the Land
'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
About Siddhartha Mukherjee
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.
Author photo © Deborah Feingold
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