The Emperor of All Maladies

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out 'war against cancer. Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteenth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjees own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge. Riveting and magesterial, it provides a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.