The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (Playaway Adult Nonfiction) (preloaded digital .. details from bookadda

A magnificent, beautifully written biography of cancer - from itsfirst documented appearances thousands of years ago through theepic battles to cure, control and conquer it to a radical newunderstanding of its essence. In The Emperor of All Maladies,Siddhartha Mukherjee, doctor, researcher and award-winning sciencewriter, examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, ahistorian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The result isan astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humanshave lived with - and perished from - for more than five thousandyears. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity,resilience and perseverance, but also of hubris, arrogance andmisperception, all leveraged against a disease that, just threedecades ago, was thought to be easily vanquished in an all-out 'waragainst cancer'. Mukherjee recounts centuries of discoveries,setbacks, victories and deaths, told through the eyes ofpredecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitelyresourceful adversary. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greekslave cut off her malignant breast, to the nineteeth-centuryrecipient of primitive radiation and chemotherapy and Mukherjee'sown leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is aboutthe people who have soldiered through toxic, bruising, and drainingregimes to survive and to increase the store of human knowledge.Riveting and magesterial, The Emperor of All Maladies provides afascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments and abrilliant new perspective on the way doctors, scientists,philosophers and lay people have observed and understood the humanbody for millennia.