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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of…
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The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (original 2010; edition 2010)

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingConversations / Mentions
5,0121962,171 (4.3)1 / 340
A "biography" of cancer from its origins to the epic battle to cure, control, and conquer it. A combination of medical history, cutting-edge science, and narrative journalism that transforms the listener's understanding of cancer and much of the world around them. The author provides a glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers, and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.… (more)
Member:BarbKBooks
Title:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Authors:Siddhartha Mukherjee
Info:Scribner, Hardcover, 571 pages
Collections:Your library
Rating:
Tags:to-read, book-awards, science-and-medicine

Work Information

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010)

  1. 42
    The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis (lemontwist)
  2. 21
    Illness as Metaphor & AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag (caitlinlizzy)
  3. 10
    And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts (DetailMuse)
    DetailMuse: Both are excellent history-of-medicine narratives.
  4. 00
    Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber by Ken Wilber (wester)
    wester: A time-slice of cancer history in a personal story, versus the overview of this same history. Close up and panorama view of the same thing.
  5. 00
    The Philadelphia Chromosome: A Mutant Gene and the Quest to Cure Cancer at the Genetic Level by Jessica Wapner (hailelib)
    hailelib: Expands on Mukherjee's discussion of the development and testing of Gleevec.
  6. 00
    p53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code by Sue Armstrong (rodneyvc)
  7. 00
    Last Night in the OR: A Transplant Surgeon's Odyssey by Bud Shaw (JenniferRobb)
    JenniferRobb: Last Night in the OR discusses early liver transplants; The Emperor of All Maladies details the evolution of cancer treatment
  8. 01
    The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (jigarpatel)
    jigarpatel: Given the relationship between cancer and genetic pathways, Mukherjee's later The Gene (2016) is insightful for the layperson, recommend this as a precursor to The Emperor of All Maladies.
  9. 02
    The Wisdom of the Body: Discovering the Human Spirit by Sherwin B. Nuland (fountainoverflows)
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 Science!: Emperor of Maladies-- book about cancer6 unread / 6kirahelm, July 2012

» See also 340 mentions

English (191)  Spanish (1)  German (1)  Dutch (1)  Italian (1)  All languages (195)
Showing 1-5 of 191 (next | show all)
4.5 stars ( )
  EllieBhurrut | Jan 24, 2024 |
You know the feeling that you get when you're done reading a book on the subject and realize how it changed your understanding of the field dramatically? Such as Feynman's Lectures on Physics, A Brief History of Time, or The Emperor's New Mind? This magnificent treatise on cancer is just what the subject needed - a meticulous, no-holds-barred treatment that reveals a plethora of information on cancer, and our ancient, never-ending war with it - a constantly shape-shifting enemy whose root is ourselves.
Mukherjee describes in eye-watering detail how our understanding of cancer has changed in around four thousand years, and how the landscape of the 'War Against Cancer' has undergone multiple paradigm shifts - from the witch-doctors who thought the best cure for the then-unnamed disease was crab soup; to current efforts, which are a mixture of chemotherapy and targeted drugs, some of which can almost erase certain cancers from its roots.
Absolutely no detail is withheld from the reader - the politics, the money, the legal battles over potential cures and clinical trials, the innumerable doctors involved, the patients whose lives were altered with the onset of the disease, and how each potential drug worked (or why it stopped working).
Mukherjee also focuses on how patients embrace their sickness as the new normal, and how some patients accept death easier than doctors - his work is, above all, a testimony to the tenacity and resilience of the human spirit.
In conclusion, although this might not be the most readable book, it is definitely one of the most sobering books I have ever encountered. A must-read. ( )
  SidKhanooja | Sep 1, 2023 |
Great book. It's very helpful for anyone who is a caregiver or is afflicted with Cancer. It gave me a new perspective as a caregiver/ It is very detailed and requires some work to read and understand. ( )
  Michael_Lilly | Aug 7, 2023 |
The book starts out rooted firmly in the human experience, told through the stories of patients, doctors, and discoverers from the ancients up through the modern era. I found these stories fascinating and often incredibly sad; I could relate to them. Around the 1960s the book shifts into a more technical vein, which makes sense because this is when so many innovations in cancer research and treatment began, but I found myself disengaging from the story. The author does a laudable job of keeping the human experience a part of the story, but this is a biography of cancer - not humans - and at some point the story becomes less about "us" and more about "it". Or rather, "them", because one of the most fascinating parts of the book was seeing how heterogenous cancer is in the human body. Lymphomas are completely different from breast cancer, which is completely different from sarcoma, etc. I truly had no idea.

Also fascinating was how breast cancer was the focus of cancer research for literally hundreds of years. This seems like a woman-positive situation until you discover the devastating surgeries and experiments that doctors inflicted on the female body. Would they have been so quick to carve out literal pounds of flesh if these were male bodies? Would male patients have had more authority over their own care, and been fully informed about what was about to be done to their bodies? Kudos to the author for explicitly calling out the medical industry on its historically cavalier treatment of women, and acknowledging the women of the 1970s who refused to be sidelined in their own treatment, and thus forged the patients' rights movement out of the second-wave feminist movement. ( )
  blueskygreentrees | Jul 30, 2023 |
Me tomó varios meses leer este libro, varios de ellos mientras convivía con una persona muy cercana, enferma de cáncer. Entonces, me costó mucho trabajo, tanto que tuve que dejarlo en espera un par de meses.

Ahora que he vuelto a él, lo encuentro un libro súper intenso por los casos de estudio, por las metáforas, por las explicaciones y la información científica (que además es bastante accesible a un lector sin conocimiento de medicina, biología, química o todas las disciplinas que se unen para luchar contra esta enfermedad).

Me quedo con un fragmento casi al final del libro que creo resume esta lectura: "La mejor manera de 'ganar' la guerra contra el cáncer consiste, quizás, en redefinir la victoria". ( )
  uvejota | Jul 26, 2023 |
Showing 1-5 of 191 (next | show all)
It's time to welcome a new star in the constellation of great doctor-writers. With this fat, enthralling, juicy, scholarly, wonderfully written history of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee - a cancer physician and researcher at Columbia University - vaults into that exalted company ...
 

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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Siddhartha Mukherjeeprimary authorall editionscalculated
Hoye, StephenNarratorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed

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Epigraph
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. —Susan Sontag
Dedication
To Robert Sandler (1945-1948), and to those who came before and after him.
First words
Prologue
Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved
Or not at all.

—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet

Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of
scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget
this one basic fact. . . . Doctors treat diseases, but they also
treat people, and this precondition of their professional
existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once.

—June Goodfield

On the morning of May 19, 2004, Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, woke up in bed with a headache.
In a damp fourteen-by-twenty-foot laboratory in Boston on a December morning in 1947, a man named Sidney Farber waited impatiently for the arrival of a parcel from New York.
Quotations
In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. —Sherlock Holmes, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet
Physicians of the utmost fame Were called at once; but when they came They answered, as they took their Fees, "There is no Cure for this Disease." —Hilaire Belloc
Its palliation is a daily task, its cure a fervent hope. —William Castle, describing leukemia in 1950
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(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)
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A "biography" of cancer from its origins to the epic battle to cure, control, and conquer it. A combination of medical history, cutting-edge science, and narrative journalism that transforms the listener's understanding of cancer and much of the world around them. The author provides a glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and offers a bold new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers, and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

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