The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies

Health & Lifestyle , Illness & Specific Conditions, Non-Fiction
Paperback Published on: 29/09/2011
£12.99
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Bookseller Reviews

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The Emperor of All Maladies
The Emperor of All Maladies
This book is perhaps the archetypal difficult pleasure: a biography of cancer; the human disease that strikes such resonanant fear into humans that sometim... READ MORE
Stuart

Synopsis

Winner of the Guardian First Book Award 2011

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction 2011

Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2011

Shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize

In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, 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, 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’. Mukherjee 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 nineteeth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee’s 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, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • ISBN: 9780007250929
  • Number of pages: 400
  • Weight: 430g
  • Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 38 mm

Customer Reviews

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The Emperor of All Maladies
A really interesting book
I read a lot of "popular science" titles and I must admit that this kept me reading solidily for a week. It's a well written description of cancer and it's... READ MORE
Mozz