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. 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. Almost indiscernibly, her gums had begun to turn white. 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. Late in April, Carla had discovered a few bruises on her back. Something had been terribly wrong for nearly a month. The kind of numbness that instantly tells you that something is terribly wrong.”

“Not just any headache,” she would recall later, “but a sort of numbness in my head. 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. 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. ExcerptĬancer begins and ends with people. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. 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. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. 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. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a biographer’s passion.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and 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-from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.

The emperor of all diseases