The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
A biography of cancer: its history, its science, the lives it has claimed and the battles fought against it. Mukherjee writes with the rigor of an oncologist and the soul of a novelist. Won the Pulitzer in 2011, named the best book of the year by Time, and gave millions of patients and families a framework for understanding the disease.
The book shows “a complete, fatal, inability to leave anything out,” and giving “40 pages to the link between smoking and cancer” in a book about treatment strikes many as bloat. The chronology keeps “zipping up and back down the historical timeline, for no obvious reason.” Published in 2010, it now reads as dated: no immunotherapy, thin on the genomic treatments that followed. Some push back on personifying cancer as a cunning adversary, arguing it undercuts the book's own point that cancer is many diseases; the chapters are “not all equally fascinating,” and to one reader the whole “feels like a long magazine article.” Book clubs report “some of our group just couldn't read it.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
