Book Review: The Emperor of All Maladies

The Emperor of All Maladies won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. Its author, Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a Rhodes scholar and a graduate of Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. By the end of this monumental work, I was waxing a bit blurry-eyed (or should I say eared, since I listened) at all the acronyms, medication names, etc. They blended together and my interest flagged. But overall, it was a worthwhile experience (even on audio). I appreciated Mukherjee’s book on The Gene, so I knew what I was getting into. 

This thorough look into cancer over the ages offers the complete story of every challenge and every advance. Many individual battles personalize the story and serve as examples. Although I have members of my family who have battled cancer (my father had kidney cancer, my brother testicular cancer, and my niece had leukemia), I listened to this book from a privileged perspective. I have not had to endure the terror and the trauma of such a diagnosis. I agree with Adam Hochschild who writes, “Mukherjee joins the first rank of those rare doctor-authors who can wield a pen as gracefully as a scalpel.”