Winner from the Pulitzer Prize, and today a documentary from Ken Burns up on PBS, The Emperor of All Maladies is an impressive, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer-from it is first documented performances thousands of years ago through the epic fights in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it all to a radical new knowledge of its essence.

Doctor, researcher, and award-winning technology article writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines tumor with a cellular biologist’s accuracy, a historian’s about The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer perspective, and a biographer’s enthusiasm. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of an illness humans have lived with-and perished from-for a lot more than five thousand years.

The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, informed through the eye of his predecessors and peers, teaching their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, simply three years ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads such as a literary thriller with malignancy as the protagonist.

From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave might have take off her diseased breast, towards the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive rays and chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is approximately the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens to be able to survive-and to increase our knowledge of this iconic disease.

Riveting, urgent, and amazing, The Emperor of most Maladies offers a exciting glimpse into the upcoming of cancer treatments. It really is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to people wanting to demystify cancer.