The Emperor of All Maladies

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Feb 2011 · HarperCollins UK

About this ebook

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction 2011

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize

Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize

Now, as cancer becomes an ever more universal experience, the need to understand it, and its treatment, has never been more compelling. In this groundbreaking and award-winning account Siddhartha Mukherjee tells the fascinating story of our relationship with this disease. From brutal early surgical treatments, to Sidney Farber’s hugely risky discovery of chemotherapy, to the author’s treatment of his own patients, he reveals how far we have come in solving one of science's great mysteries and offers a fascinating glimpse of our future progress.

Ratings and reviews

This has nothing to do with the content of the book itself. I enjoyed the little that I was able to read. My complaint is with the eBook that somehow has its pagination messed up. Large chunks of the book are all recognised as a single "page". As a result, I can never pick up where I left off. Each time I return to the book, it will start from a point that are dozens of pages behind where I left off. Bookmarking doesn't work. The eBook is simply unreadable.

This is a truly epic book on cancer. I can't praise it high enough. I studied molecular biology and enjoyed revisiting all the basics as well as picking up things I didn't learn. The way the author brought research to life is well done. To anyone who has read this and enjoyed it I will also recommend the brain that changes itself by Norman Doidge.

Very good book. Helped me to understand the meaning, significance and history of the ever-progressing cancer research. Good for nerds. Has lot of complicated terms.

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.