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    The Emperor of All Maladies
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    The Emperor of All Maladies
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    The Emperor of All Maladies
    Audiobook20 hours

    The Emperor of All Maladies

    Written by Siddhartha Mukherjee

    Narrated by Stephen Hoye

    4.5/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    A comprehensive history of cancer – one of the greatest enemies of medical progress – and an insight into its effects and potential cures, by a leading expert on the illness.

    In The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning science writer, examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s 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, arrogance and misperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just three decades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out ‘war against cancer’. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries, setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes of predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely resourceful adversary.

    From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteeth-century recipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and draining regimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.

    Riveting and magesterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and a brilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists, philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the human body for millennia.

    Editor's Note

    Pulitzer Prize-winner…

    Acclaimed science author Mukherjee tells the story of humanity’s most formidable adversary with the passion of a biographer in this Pulitzer Prize-winner.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateAug 25, 2011
    ISBN9780007421114
    Unavailable
    The Emperor of All Maladies
    Author

    Siddhartha Mukherjee

    Siddhartha Mukherjee is the author of 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.

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    Reviews for The Emperor of All Maladies

    4.5/5

    174 ratings103 reviews

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    • 5/5
      We are all touched by cancer in some way. This fascinating book is a "biography" of cancer. It is very enlightening in many ways. We learn about the disease and the history of treatments. It really gives insight into how crude the treatments and research methods really are. Nonetheless, there is amazing progress being made. This book is written in an understandable and very readable way. I say this one is a must read!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      A recommended gift for a student contemplating a research career, since it leaves out most of the negative biographical gossip about its cast of scientists and practitioners, unlike political and literary collective biographies. Fascinating read; if you like Sherwin Nuland's books you'll enjoy this one. It's a little troubling that so many lay readers find the section on genetics to be a big stumbling block since work in that area has been such an important breakthrough in our understanding of the disease(s). Commendable too that the author addresses the political aspects of scientific and medical research, especially the need to balance the immediate and understandable desire of patients to get the most advanced treatment possible and the need for dispassionate testing to determine whether a protocol actually works. For practical reasons, a new protocol won't be manufactured and widely distributed, and covered by insurance, until it's been validated empirically, so in a sense the needs of current patients are in contention with the needs of future patients. Both researchers and patients are caught between a rock and a hard place, and it may be that researchers are better off not having the average amount of human empathy.
    • 5/5
      This is a worthwhile read. It is both scary and informative, valuable and heartbreaking. I took it out of the library when I first read it and had to renew it because I had yet to finish. I finally just went ahead and bought my own copy and read it while in transit. I don't want to give anything away, but if you have cancer, are a survivor or just someone that wants to know more about it, I highly recommend you read this one.
      This is not fiction, but the pages turn, as if it was one.
      Overall, everyone out there has to read this book.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written.
    • 5/5
      My guess is I'm not the first person to use the term "magisterial" to describe this so-called "biography" of cancer. In fact I would be surprised if many people had not used the term in their description. It begins with Imhotep's description/diagnosis of cancer and the stark statement that there is nothing that can be done about it. And then it moves forward charting our understanding of the disease, the evolution of the main types of treatment, how we think about the disease, all interspersed with a few stories of his own patients that illustrate many of the larger themes in the book.

      I initially thought it was poorly organized and like any historical survey took too long to get to the modern understanding and in particular the molecular biological understanding of cancer. But it eventually got there, in a quite fullsome way, and looking back it was a coherent read and actually an exciting page turner. I just wish we knew how it ends--but that chapter has not been written yet.
    • 4/5
      What an amazing education this book is. I find it important to at least have a rudimentary understanding of this scourge of humanity. It's vital. We all know someone affected one way or another, and the knowledge contained here allows for an understanding and deeper empathy. I was a little lost on a lot of the mechanics, but Mukherjee shines because he doesn't point the spotlight on himself (as opposed to Atul Gawande, though this is not a failing in any way), rather he sticks to the biography with verve and clarity. You get the crisp feeling that the material isn't researched, but rather, part of the author's corpus. He's truly qualified to speak about cancer and his expertise is admirable. Great book.
    • 5/5
      Very interesting "biography of cancer" that makes me really glad we've passed the "let's just remove everything in the vicinity of the tumor, I'm sure that muscle is not terribly important"-stage of cancer treatment already - and makes me wonder which of todays treatments we will look back on in horror in 30 years. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Mukherjee traces human understanding of cancer from earliest recorded history to the present day. A mixture of epidemiology, sociology, history, bio textbook and personal stories should be a disjointed mess, but instead it's a nearly perfectly cohesive "biography" of cancer. I'm astonished at how ambitious Mukherjee was--and how successful. I want do re-read this someday, to refresh my memory of all the interesting tidbits and theories he shares.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating study of cancer by an oncologist. A little jargony in places, but very much worth your time.
    • 4/5
      4.5 A thorough and reasonably elegant introduction to cancer; how we know what we know. A point for the scientists in the eternal expert vs. writer non-fiction conflict. Very slightly overwritten at parts, the book covers a great deal of difficult ground with pleasant speed. Worth it for the chapter quotes.
    • 5/5
      medicine bookbox; fascinating for such a difficult subject. Cancer really is a suite of diseases and more prominent now because other diseases, like flu and TB aren't killing us any more.
    • 5/5
      READ IN DUTCH

      I had been willing to read The Emperor of All Maladies for quite some time, but never got to it before.

      At University I follow classes from Biomedical Sciences, so I found it really interesting to read about this. The book is not only about cancer, but mostly about all the different ways scientists en doctors have tried to defeat cancer. Many ways to so have (unfortunately) failed, but it also shows that through more and more research we are coming closer to a better solution.

      Personally I liked to see so many things I've heard in college be mentioned in this book.
    • 5/5
      Readable linear history of cancer treatment with a strong emphasis on the characters - biomedical researchers, physicians, surgeons, patients and publicists - behind the transforming landscape of oncology.The layperson may wish to first read Mukherjee's more technical The Gene: An Intimate History (2016) to appreciate some of the latest research he outlines.
    • 4/5
      Book on CD read by Stephen Hoye

      The subtitle really says it all: A Biography of Cancer. Mukherjee has extensively researched the disease, going back to recorded cases in ancient Egypt and carefully documented efforts to treat, eradicate, or “cure.” He recounts stories of the many scientists who meticulously searched for and sometimes stumbled up new treatments, showing a passion and dedication to the science and to the human beings whose lives they tried to save.

      Some of these stories are horrifying: the treatments with dung or bleedings, the determination to cut more and more tissue in a radical mastectomy. Some are uplifting: the tireless efforts of philanthropists and scientists in the “war against cancer,” the grace and dignity of patients with little hope of a cure who nevertheless soldiered on, the “miraculous” survival of Little Jimmy and others.

      There is considerable medical and scientific jargon. This did not bother me much (I used to do medical transcription, and still read quite a few operative notes weekly), and I think Mukherjee is pretty good at explaining terminology that might not be familiar to a lay person. His use of some patient histories also helps to break up the litany of scientific breakthroughs, and makes the book much more human and relatable.

      Stephen Hoye does a fine job of narrating the audio version. His voice can be a little droning, however, and given the heavy scientific / medical jargon that is required in sections there were times when I really just wanted to stop listening to him. I think this would be better appreciated if read in a text version rather than listened to in audio format.
    • 5/5
      This is an epic volume. It could be argued that it could have been written with a more poetic, or should I say, flamboyant style, but it is very clearly and solidly crafted, despite it not coming from a journalist or historian, trained in the craft. It is subtitled as a "biography", but being a bit of a history buff, it reads to me more like a mix between an elaborate mystery and a war history. The media of today tends to lump all cancers together into some type of alien invasion that never ceases to attack. In fact, while this book establishes that at its very deepest essence, cancers are all the same, they attack in such varied ways that it feels to society like an all out assault on our populations with every conceivable weapon at the enemy's disposal. If other readers want to stay superficial in their understanding of this great enemy, so be it. But if you want to know and understand a force that is dramatically more likely to do harm to you than whatever terrorist from your favorite hated religious group, then you owe it to yourself to read this. One side comment: if you happen to have seen the very recent PBS documentary based on this book, please know that you have barely scratched the surface of the book and in a not very eloquent way. Read the book. You'll have a much better understanding of the subject and not be left with the mistaken impressions that the video provides.
    • 3/5
      A friend gave me this book as a gift around the time I was going through cancer treatment. I didn't read it right away figuring the subject would be too difficult both physically (due to treatment related fatigue) and emotionally. Even now, almost 3 years later, parts of it were hard for me to read.The book delves into the history of cancer and into the development of cancer treatments. It's amazing to realize how recent the treatment regimen I was on had been developed--and hard not to be grateful for not having to go through what some of the early sufferers did.
    • 5/5
      A literary, historical, scientific work, meticulously thorough and hauntingly memorable.
    • 4/5
      I don't quite buy the conceit that this is a "biography" rather than a more prosaic work of history. But it's very informative and not difficult to read, at least once one gets past the hypochondria-inducing initial chapters. Captures both the thrill of scientific discovery and the agony as each discovery ends up proving inadequate.
    • 5/5
      nonfiction/medical science. a fascinating comprehensive history of oncology that treats cancer not as a discrete medical phenomenon but as a human condition that touches so many of us personally.
    • 5/5
      This was a phenomenal listen. I’m struck by how captivating, informative, and human a book about a disease can me. Captivating and moving.
    • 5/5
      Very well written. Highly recommended despite very sad topic. .
    • 5/5
      A humongous book about cancer? Doesn't sound like a good time, but it was a fascinating and very human learning experience about a disease that is so pervasive and so feared.
    • 4/5
      The author has a patient and methodical way of explaining the thinking and the science (or lack of it) behind each step in our understanding of what cancer is and how to treat it. He occasionally draws on metaphors from literature, history and mythology. A good, solid educational read.
    • 5/5
      When death approaches in Western countries, the choice is between heart disease and cancer. A choice often made by one's own cells, an effect of evolution's unplanned planned obsolescence and lifestyle choices. Mankind seems to finally approaching some kind of victory on the War on Cancer, so often promised but not fulfilled. At the same time, the obesity bulge explodes the number of heart patients. Nevertheless, in the field of oncology, it is time for a little bit of celebration. Siddhartha Mukherjee's excellent history of the different approaches of cancer treatment is an uplifting success story, despite the enormous number of casualties in the war(s) against cancer. This war of attrition, of cohort after cohort being killed by their own body, makes for ghastly reading. Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha said "I can wait.", a luxury a cancer patient does not have. Cancer is a nasty, brutal malady, a destroyer from within, that is fought with the full arsenal of medicinal weaponry: surgery, poison, radiation. Despite the positive medical advances, it is still a story of human suffering, of too many casualties, of lives and dreams cut short.Mukherjee expertly shows that better understanding of the disease leads to better treatment. Surgery was the first modern marvel used against cancer. Cut, cut, cut. Then radiation and chemical poisoning. Finally, with the understanding of cellular activities and modern genetics, truly targeted treatments that actually work are possible. What was incurable just one or two generations ago becomes manageable even curable (but at an extremely high cost for the expertise and machinery deployed).Mukherjee's story is also a celebration of the lab rats (human and murine). The mousy technicians with little to no patient interaction who nevertheless solved the puzzles of cancer are the true heroes of this book. While the book suffers from a US-centricity (whereas cancer research is a global undertaking), it is a splendid work both in the history of medicine and invention. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This highly acclaimed work (winning a Pulitzer Prize) deserves every one of its adulations. It is not only personal, erudite, and interesting; it is also inspiring and well-written.

      Mukherjee attempts to present “a biography of cancer,” starting from its first mention in the historical record (a Queen of Persia). A practicing oncologist, he also ties in patient stories to advance the narrative in appropriate places.

      Generally, he tells the tale of how humanity and science has wrestled with cancer over the past several millennia. Obviously, he pays special attention to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as this is where most of the action lies. In truth, with infectious diseases well countered with antibiotics and vaccines, cancer looms as one of humanity’s greatest menaces. And as Mukherjee admits, cancer has indisputably won the war thus far.

      He does provide hope because research has provided much insight in the last thirty-or-so years. With an acumen as only a practicing physician can offer, he summarizes the progress of research with personal insights and stories. He divulges the basis for cancer in DNA and what this insight provides in terms of therapy. While doing all this, Mukherjee maintains a basic narrative with the skill of a studied historian. This is a great work to read for anyone interested in healthcare and medicine.
    • 5/5
      Siddhartha displays an excellent understanding of cancer and is able to describe it in understandable terms. This book covers the history of cancer and discusses advances, problems, and causes in cancer. Although I have worked in the field for years, I learned quite a bit. Thanks go to Siddhartha for putting this book together.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating exploration of cancer's history--dense science made understandable, if heartbreaking. I realize that my mom died while inroads were being furiously sought for her breast cancer, and that today my dad's CML might actually be curable-- not treatable, curable. Amazing.

      As a physician I was always frustrated by people thinking of cancer as one disease, since it's really a myriad of as many diseases as there are organs. But now I see why the perception is there and indeed, how it makes some kind of sense in the thinking about cancer.
    • 5/5
      I brilliant book that massages your soul. Packed with medical history and the progression of treatments, this book will bore the hell out of you some chapters and keep you hungrily devouring the pages of others.
    • 4/5
      Fascinating overview on the "topic of Cancer". Cancer is ubiquitous, so everyone should read this overview book. One needs to pay attention though. The biochemical, metabolic, genetic, and pharmacological terminology is a real challenge. It's better to focus on a chapter or so, at a time. The ending of this "biography" notes that cancer is a genetic reality within our bodies. The war of cancer may be considered won, if cancers can be delayed long enough so that patients can lead a normal life.
    • 5/5
      An inspiring historical trek through the topic of cancer. Mukherjee puts in just the right amount of history, science, and his own story to make this so enjoyable. I will go back to this one often!