The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer in Reading with Style

Feb 28, 2013 Wendy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-nature, non-fiction, audiobooks, pulitzer

Next spring marks ten years since my mother passed away from Ocular Melanoma, a lesser-known yet deadly cancer variant. I was in college at the time. Having spent almost my entire childhood under cancer's shadow--she was first diagnosed when I was two, though was "cured" for roughly fifteen years--I finally feel enough distance to approach the topic of cancer from a more removed vantage-point.

I try not to give out 5 star reviews very often. Usually I save 5-star reviews, not just for excellent b ...more

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Feb 22, 2011 Juniper rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: effing-awesome, owned, 2011-books, nonfiction, biography

Mukherjee spent nearly 7 years researching, compiling and writing this biography of cancer. While he was in medical school. Say what? Dude, apparently, wasn't busy enough.

This book is stellar. We are given a detailed history of the disease, but also of the research and the doctors and scientists who have spent their lives trying to understand cancer and find a cure. Interspersed, we are introduced to patients - both those who lived and those whose malignancies were just too fierce. Mukherjee man ...more

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Aug 21, 2014 Joanna rated it it was amazing

Shelves: nonfiction, microhistory, 2014-read, rws-2014-fall

I read about half of this book in print, then listened to the other half as an audiobook. While the reader for the audiobook is fine, there is so much technical information packed into this book that it bogged down a bit in audio format in a way that it did not in print. That said, this is a fantastic book. The book traces the scientific, political, and, to some extent, social history of cancer. The author is able to organize a tremendous amount of information into a highly readable account. I h ...more

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Jan 09, 2011 Kathleen (itpdx) rated it really liked it

Shelves: lwv-book-group, non-fiction

I don't know how Mukherjee has done it. But if it were easy, we would have many more wonderful books that bring a subject into clear focus.

I don't suspect there are many people whose lives have not been touched by cancer. Friends, relatives, acquaintances have died, survived or are currently fighting some form of cancer.

Mukherjee brings the disease into focus--what we have theorized in the past, what we know now, how our treatments and prevention strategies have evolved. And he does this in a ...more

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