Book Summary and Reviews of The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. Mukherjee's formidable intelligence and compassion produce a stunning account of the effort to disrobe the 'emperor of maladies.'" - Publishers Weekly

"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 Leopold's Ghost and Bury the Chains

"Sid Mukherjee's book is a pleasure to read, if that is the right word. Cancer today is widely regarded as the worst of all the diseases from which one might suffer -- if only because it is fast becoming the most common. Dr. Mukherjee explains how this perception came about, how cancer has been regarded across the years and what is now being done to treat its protean forms. 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 can not just talk about their profession but write about it." - Tony Judt, author of Postwar and Ill Fares the Land

"The Emperor of All Maladies beautifully describes the nature of cancer from a patient's 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

"Rarely have the science and poetry of illness been so elegantly braided together as they are in this erudite, engrossing, kind book. Mukherjee's clinical wisdom never erases the personal tragedies which are its occasion; indeed, he locates with meticulous clarity and profound compassion the beautiful hope buried in cancer's ravages." - Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon

This information about The Emperor of All Maladies was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee Author Biography

Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and The Gene: An Intimate History, 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 assistant 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. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and Cell. He lives in New York with his wife and daughters.

Name Pronunciation
Siddhartha Mukherjee: sih-DART-uh MOO-ker-jee

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