The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Engl

Description: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee "This edition includes a new interview with the author"--P. [4] of cover. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, adapted as a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is "an extraordinary achievement" (The New Yorker)--a magnificent, profoundly humane "biography" of cancer. Now updated with three chapters illuminating the new preventions, treatments, and understanding of cancer in the years since the books first publication. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologists precision, a historians perspective, and a biographers 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, paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out "war against cancer." The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer. Author Biography Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Song of the Cell, The Gene: An Intimate History, a #1 New York Times bestseller; The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction; and The Laws of Medicine. He is the editor of Best Science Writing 2013. Mukherjee is an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician and researcher. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, and Harvard Medical School. In 2023, he was elected as a new member of the National Academy of Medicine. He has published articles in many journals, including Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters. Visit his website at: SiddharthaMukherjee.com. Review "Mukherjee brings an impressive balance of empathy and dispassion to this instantly essential piece of medical journalism." --Time "A meticulously researched, panoramic history . . . What makes Mukherjees narrative so remarkable is that he imbues decades of painstaking laboratory investigation with the suspense of a mystery novel and urgency of a thriller. . . . He possesses a striking gift for carving some of sciences most abstruse concepts into forms as easily understood and reconfigured as a childs wooden blocks." --The Boston Globe "Riveting and powerful . . . Mukherjees extraordinary book might stimulate a wider discussion of how to wisely allocate our precious health care resources." --San Francisco Chronicle "Remarkable . . . The reader devours this fascinating book . . . Mukherjee is a clear and determined writer. . . . An unusually humble, insightful book." --Los Angeles Times "Extraordinary . . . So often physician writers attempt the delicacy of using their patients as a mirror to their own humanity. Mukherjee does the opposite. His book is not built to show us the good doctor struggling with tough decisions, but ourselves." --John Freeman, NPR "Now and then a writer comes along who helps us fathom both the intricacies of a scientific specialty and its human meaning. Lewis Thomas, Sherwin Nuland, and Oliver Sacks come to mind. Add to their company Siddhartha Mukherjee." --Elle "Rich and engrossing . . . With the perceptiveness and patience of a true scientist, [Mukherjee] begins to weave these individual threads into a coherent and engrossing narrative." --The Economist "A brilliant, riveting history of the disease . . . Threaded throughout, and propelling the narrative forward, are the affecting tales of Mukherjees own patients." --Entertainment Weekly "Ambitious . . . Mukherjee has a storytellers flair and a gift for translating complex medical concepts into simple language." --The Wall Street Journal "Cancer has never been as fully explored as in Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjees fascinating and moving history." --The Daily Beast "With epic scope and passionate pen, The Emperor of All Maladies boldly addresses, then breaks down the monolith of disease." --The Onion A.V. Club "Informative, elegant, comprehensive, and lucid." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "Mukherjees elegant prose animates the science." --Bloomberg News "Brilliant and riveting." --Associated Press "[A] brilliant book." --Larry King "A magnificent book." --Sanjay Gupta, M.D., CNN "An ambitious scientific, political, and cultural history." --Slate.com "Intensely readable." --New York Post "Impressive." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "Mukherjee . . . writes with supreme authority." -- The Seattle Times "Mukherjee makes us understand that along with our terrible losses, great gains have been made." --Newsday "Eminently readable . . . A surprisingly accessible and encouraging narrative." --Booklist (starred review) "A beautifully written account of the ingenuity, hubris, courage, and utter confusion humankind has brought to its attempts to grapple with cancer." --Macleans "Future biographers and historians of the disease will labor from deep with the long shadow cast by Siddhartha Mukherjees remarkable The Emperor of All Maladies. . . . A vivid and profoundly engaging read." --BookPage "Sweeping . . . Mukherjees formidable intelligence and compassion produce a stunning account." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Siddhartha Mukherjees The Emperor of All Maladies left me shaken, fascinated, and not depressed, because he gives a face to our old enemy, cancer." --Emma Donoghue, author of Room "Sid Mukherjees book is a pleasure to read, if that is the right word. . . . His book is the clearest account I have read on this subject. With The Emperor of All Maladies, he joins that small fraternity of practicing doctors who cannot just talk about their profession but write about it." --Tony Judt, author of The Memory Chalet "Rarely have the science and poetry of illness been so elegantly braided together as they are in this erudite, engrossing, kind book." --Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon "At once learned and skeptical, unsentimental and humane, The Emperor of All Maladies is that rarest of things--a noble book." --David Rieff, author of Swimming in a Sea of Death "A magisterial, wise, and deeply human piece of writing." --Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopolds Ghost and Bury the Chains "The Emperor of All Maladies beautifully describes the nature of cancer from a patients perspective and how basic research has opened the door to understanding this disease." --Bert Vogelstein, director, Ludwig Center at Johns Hopkins University "A labor of love . . . as comprehensive as possible." --George Canellos, M.D., William Rosenberg Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School "An elegant . . . tour de force. The Emperor of All Maladies reads like a novel . . . but it deals with real people and real successes, as well as with the many false notions and false leads. Not only will the book bring cancer research and cancer biology to the lay public, it will help attract young researchers to a field that is at once exciting and heart wrenching . . . and important." --Donald Berry, Ph.D., MD Anderson Cancer Center, University of Texas Review Quote "With this riveting and moving book, Siddhartha Mukherjee joins the first rank of those rare doctor-authors who can wield a pen as gracefully as a scalpel: Jerome Groopman, Atul Gawande, Richard Selzer. A magisterial, wise, and deeply human piece of writing."--Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopolds Ghost and Bury the Chains Excerpt from Book The Emperor of all Maladies Prologue Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all. --William Shakespeare, Hamlet Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact.... Doctors treat diseases, but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once. --June Goodfield On the morning of May 19, 2004, Carla Reed, a thirty-year-old kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a mother of three young children, woke up in bed with a headache. "Not just any headache," she would recall later, "but a sort of numbness in my head. The kind of numbness that instantly tells you that something is terribly wrong." Something had been terribly wrong for nearly a month. Late in April, Carla had discovered a few bruises on her back. They had suddenly appeared one morning, like strange stigmata, then grown and vanished over the next month, leaving large map-shaped marks on her back. Almost indiscernibly, her gums had begun to turn white. By early May, Carla, a vivacious, energetic woman accustomed to spending hours in the classroom chasing down five- and six-year-olds, could barely walk up a flight of stairs. Some mornings, exhausted and unable to stand up, she crawled down the hallways of her house on all fours to get from one room to another. She slept fitfully for twelve or fourteen hours a day, then woke up feeling so overwhelmingly tired that she needed to haul herself back to the couch again to sleep. Carla and her husband saw a general physician and a nurse twice during those four weeks, but she returned each time with no tests and without a diagnosis. Ghostly pains appeared and disappeared in her bones. The doctor fumbled about for some explanation. Perhaps it was a migraine, she suggested, and asked Carla to try some aspirin. The aspirin simply worsened the bleeding in Carlas white gums. Outgoing, gregarious, and ebullient, Carla was more puzzled than worried about her waxing and waning illness. She had never been seriously ill in her life. The hospital was an abstract place for her; she had never met or consulted a medical specialist, let alone an oncologist. She imagined and concocted various causes to explain her symptoms--overwork, depression, dyspepsia, neuroses, insomnia. But in the end, something visceral arose inside her--a seventh sense--that told Carla something acute and catastrophic was brewing within her body. On the afternoon of May 19, Carla dropped her three children with a neighbor and drove herself back to the clinic, demanding to have some blood tests. Her doctor ordered a routine test to check her blood counts. As the technician drew a tube of blood from her vein, he looked closely at the bloods color, obviously intrigued. Watery, pale, and dilute, the liquid that welled out of Carlas veins hardly resembled blood. Carla waited the rest of the day without any news. At a fish market the next morning, she received a call. "We need to draw some blood again," the nurse from the clinic said. "When should I come?" Carla asked, planning her hectic day. She remembers looking up at the clock on the wall. A half-pound steak of salmon was warming in her shopping basket, threatening to spoil if she left it out too long. In the end, commonplace particulars make up Carlas memories of illness: the clock, the car pool, the children, a tube of pale blood, a missed shower, the fish in the sun, the tightening tone of a voice on the phone. Carla cannot recall much of what the nurse said, only a general sense of urgency. "Come now," she thinks the nurse said. "Come now." I heard about Carlas case at seven oclock on the morning of May 21, on a train speeding between Kendall Square and Charles Street in Boston. The sentence that flickered on my beeper had the staccato and deadpan force of a true medical emergency: Carla Reed/New patient with leukemia/14th Floor/Please see as soon as you arrive. As the train shot out of a long, dark tunnel, the glass towers of the Massachusetts General Hospital suddenly loomed into view, and I could see the windows of the fourteenth floor rooms. Carla, I guessed, was sitting in one of those rooms by herself, terrifyingly alone. Outside the room, a buzz of frantic activity had probably begun. Tubes of blood were shuttling between the ward and the laboratories on the second floor. Nurses were moving about with specimens, interns collecting data for morning reports, alarms beeping, pages being sent out. Somewhere in the depths of the hospital, a microscope was flickering on, with the cells in Carlas blood coming into focus under its lens. I can feel relatively certain about all of this because the arrival of a patient with acute leukemia still sends a shiver down the hospitals spine--all the way from the cancer wards on its upper floors to the clinical laboratories buried deep in the basement. Leukemia is cancer of the white blood cells--cancer in one of its most explosive, violent incarnations. As one nurse on the wards often liked to remind her patients, with this disease "even a paper cut is an emergency." For an oncologist in training, too, leukemia represents a special incarnation of cancer. Its pace, its acuity, its breathtaking, inexorable arc of growth forces rapid, often drastic decisions; it is terrifying to experience, terrifying to observe, and terrifying to treat. The body invaded by leukemia is pushed to its brittle physiological limit--every system, heart, lung, blood, working at the knife-edge of its performance. The nurses filled me in on the gaps in the story. Blood tests performed by Carlas doctor had revealed that her red cell count was critically low, less than a third of normal. Instead of normal white cells, her blood was packed with millions of large, malignant white cells--blasts, in the vocabulary of cancer. Her doctor, having finally stumbled upon the real diagnosis, had sent her to the Massachusetts General Hospital. In the long, bare hall outside Carlas room, in the antiseptic gleam of the floor just mopped with diluted bleach, I ran through the list of tests that would be needed on her blood and mentally rehearsed the conversation I would have with her. There was, I noted ruefully, something rehearsed and robotic even about my sympathy. This was the tenth month of my "fellowship" in oncology--a two-year immersive medical program to train cancer specialists--and I felt as if I had gravitated to my lowest point. In those ten indescribably poignant and difficult months, dozens of patients in my care had died. I felt I was slowly becoming inured to the deaths and the desolation--vaccinated against the constant emotional brunt. There were seven such cancer fellows at this hospital. On paper, we seemed like a formidable force: graduates of five medical schools and four teaching hospitals, sixty-six years of medical and scientific training, and twelve postgraduate degrees among us. But none of those years or degrees could possibly have prepared us for this training program. Medical school, internship, and residency had been physically and emotionally grueling, but the first months of the fellowship flicked away those memories as if all of that had been childs play, the kindergarten of medical training. Cancer was an all-consuming presence in our lives. It invaded our imaginations; it occupied our memories; it infiltrated every conversation, every thought. And if we, as physicians, found ourselves immersed in cancer, then our patients found their lives virtually obliterated by the disease. In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns novel Cancer Ward, Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a youthful Russian in his midforties, discovers that he has a tumor in his neck and is immediately whisked away into a cancer ward in some nameless hospital in the frigid north. The diagnosis of cancer--not the disease, but the mere stigma of its presence--becomes a death sentence for Rusanov. The illness strips him of his identity. It dresses him in a patients smock (a tragicomically cruel costume, no less blighting than a prisoners jumpsuit) and assumes absolute control of his actions. To be diagnosed with cancer, Rusanov discovers, is to enter a borderless medical gulag, a state even more invasive and paralyzing than the one that he has left behind. (Solzhenitsyn may have intended his absurdly totalitarian cancer hospital to parallel the absurdly totalitarian state outside it, yet when I once asked a woman with invasive cervical cancer about the parallel, she said sardonically, "Unfortunately, I did not need any metaphors to read the book. The cancer ward was my confining state, my prison.") As a doctor learning to tend cancer patients, I had only a partial glimpse of this confinement. But even skirting its periphery, I could still feel its power--the dense, insistent gravitational tug that pulls everything and everyone into the orbit of cancer. A colleague, freshly out of his fellowship, pulled me aside on my first week to offer some advice. "Its called an immersive training program," he said, lowering his voice. "But by immersive, they really mean drowning. Dont let it work its way into everything you do. Have a life outside the hospita Details ISBN1439170916 Author Siddhartha Mukherjee Short Title EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES Language English ISBN-10 1439170916 ISBN-13 9781439170915 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 616.994 Year 2011 Publication Date 2011-08-09 Subtitle A Biography of Cancer Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2011-08-09 NZ Release Date 2011-08-09 US Release Date 2011-08-09 UK Release Date 2011-08-09 Pages 608 Publisher Simon & Schuster Imprint Simon & Schuster Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:43681976;

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