The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee
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The Emperor of All Maladies
A Biography of Cancer

Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Narrator: Fred Sanders

Unabridged: 22 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/15/2015


Synopsis

Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, adapted as a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer.

Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.

Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.

About Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell,The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has published articles in many journals, including NatureThe New England Journal of MedicineCell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com.


Reviews

Goodreads review by David on February 27, 2012

Every year there's always one non-fiction book that the entire literate world raves about and that I hate. In 2009 it was Richard Holmes's "The Age of Wonder", the following year it was "The Emperor of All Maladies". Universally admired, winner of a Pulitzer prize, this book annoyed me so profoundly......more

Goodreads review by Riku on September 12, 2014

Anna Cancerina What a masterpiece. With beautiful metaphors, poignant case studies, breath-taking science and delectable literary allusions, Siddhartha Mukherjee takes us on a detailed yet panoramic trip spanning centuries. Probably one of the best science books I have ever read. My favorite parts in......more

Goodreads review by Julia on March 15, 2011

This is personal. Cancer entered my life uninvited trying to consume the body of my daughter, Aria. It was January 2008 when I heard the words, “We think she has leukemia.” She was four years old. In the prologue of “The Emperor of All Maladies—A Biography of Cancer” by Siddartha Mukherjee, he wrote,......more

Goodreads review by Always on April 18, 2020

I think this is a really good and accessible book about cancer that traces the history of our understanding of it. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a biography of cancer per se and I only mentioned this because I kind of feel ambivalent about the anthropomorphizing of cancer through out the book. I f......more

Goodreads review by Simon on April 14, 2021

I wanted to dislike this book. For personal reasons that I'm not quite ready to talk about yet, I really wanted this book to fall apart, to fail in its communication of the science of cancer. The longer it went on, the harder I looked for reasons to deduct a star from its rating. But I simply couldn......more