Book: The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The subtitle is A Biography of Cancer.

Elegantly written and fascinating, this book kept my interest through its several hundred pages. It is a detective story, a story of individuals (mostly scientists helped by lay people and politicians who supported and funded the science) along the historical byways of cancer who added pieces to the puzzle of what cancer is and what is isn't. This incredibly complex puzzle is certainly not complete but the researchers and scientists and physicians continually find and fit more pieces.

Ultimately, cancer is us; it is first a cell in our body that mutates in certain conditions, under certain influences (some known, others yet to be discovered), and the normal regulating rhythms and mechanisms of healthy cells no longer function. These mutated cells become super cells and some (but not all) outwit any attempt to eradicate them or disable them.

Because we all know someone with cancer or have cancer ourselves, this book has a compelling pertinence. Learning about this entity which threatens, terrifies and saddens us can help us understand what it is and perhaps even allow us to find solace and hope somehow.

Because this author writes so eloquently and lucidly about this subject, one can learn a lot about cancer from reading this book and can learn without losing one's way in pages of obscure science or boring disquisitions. I surely did.

He writes of his daughter's birth:

"Leela was born on a warm night at Massachusetts General Hospital, then swaddled in blankets and brought to the newborn unit on the fourteenth floor. The unit is directly across from the cancer ward. (The apposition of the two is hardly a coincidence. As a medical procedure, childbirth is least likely to involve infectious complications and is thus the safest neighbor to a chemotherapy ward, where any infection can turn into a lethal rampage...)

When I cut that cord, a part of me was the father, but the other part an oncologist. Umbilical blood contains one of these richest known sources of blood-forming stem cells--cells that can be stored away in cryobanks and used for a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia in the future, an intensely precious resource often flushed down a sink in the hospitals after childbirth. The midwives rolled their eyes; the obstetrician, an old friend, asked jokingly if I ever stopped thinking about work....Even in this most life-affirming of moments, the shadows of malignancy--and death--were forever lurking on my psyche."

The author is a staff physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School. In writing this book, he combines the precision of the science and the humanity of the individuals involved in the telling of this story to make a wonderful book.