22. Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
This book chronicles the history of cancer diagnosis and treatment from antiquity to the present day, and for being a fairly long book it was a damn quick read for me, because every bit of it was interesting. I was constantly looking for excuses to pick up the book and find out what would happen next. I learned an extraordinary number of things about cancer that I had no idea about before, particularly the latest theories on how it functions on a genetic level.
I have no medical background, but none was needed -- Mukherjee, an oncologist himself, has the gift of making science easy to understand without reducing it to vague analogies. The book is highly readable (though with a puzzling overuse of epigraphs -- several per chapter heading and section division produces up to five paragraph-long epigraphs in a row, in some cases!).
I appreciated the detailed treatment of cultural views of cancer in the West, how it went from a forbidden, shameful topic to something we have marches and public demonstrations about. There is a tendency today to scoff at efforts for "awareness" -- who, these days, is unaware of the high incidence of breast cancer? But there was a time when such efforts were desperately needed, and they have been so successful that we have almost forgotten why they exist. I also didn't know about the parallels and interrelationships with the fight for recognition of AIDS and its associated research.
It will come as no surprise that there are parts of the book that may be disturbing, though the parts that disturbed me the most weren't the ones I expected. Seven years ago I watched my mother die of the treatment for her cancer, and there are many stories in this book that brought me back to that time. But far more upsetting and angering to me were the devastating facts of how the connection between tobacco and cancer have been deliberately and greedily concealed. It's not that I didn't know, but it's certainly something that I've tried not to think about and that still needs attention.
Another thing that troubled me is the omnipresence of animal testing in cancer research. (I'm not going to argue this point here -- I know the reasoning behind it.) It didn't stop me from getting through the book, but it was a stumbling block. If it is for you too, be ready for that going in.
This is not any kind of a light read, but I think it is a worthy one. I recommend it to anyone whose life has been affected by cancer, which, of course, is nearly all of us.
a: Mukherjee Siddhartha, Indian-American, non-fiction, medicine
I have no medical background, but none was needed -- Mukherjee, an oncologist himself, has the gift of making science easy to understand without reducing it to vague analogies. The book is highly readable (though with a puzzling overuse of epigraphs -- several per chapter heading and section division produces up to five paragraph-long epigraphs in a row, in some cases!).
I appreciated the detailed treatment of cultural views of cancer in the West, how it went from a forbidden, shameful topic to something we have marches and public demonstrations about. There is a tendency today to scoff at efforts for "awareness" -- who, these days, is unaware of the high incidence of breast cancer? But there was a time when such efforts were desperately needed, and they have been so successful that we have almost forgotten why they exist. I also didn't know about the parallels and interrelationships with the fight for recognition of AIDS and its associated research.
It will come as no surprise that there are parts of the book that may be disturbing, though the parts that disturbed me the most weren't the ones I expected. Seven years ago I watched my mother die of the treatment for her cancer, and there are many stories in this book that brought me back to that time. But far more upsetting and angering to me were the devastating facts of how the connection between tobacco and cancer have been deliberately and greedily concealed. It's not that I didn't know, but it's certainly something that I've tried not to think about and that still needs attention.
Another thing that troubled me is the omnipresence of animal testing in cancer research. (I'm not going to argue this point here -- I know the reasoning behind it.) It didn't stop me from getting through the book, but it was a stumbling block. If it is for you too, be ready for that going in.
This is not any kind of a light read, but I think it is a worthy one. I recommend it to anyone whose life has been affected by cancer, which, of course, is nearly all of us.
a: Mukherjee Siddhartha, Indian-American, non-fiction, medicine