From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Start date: July 17, 2017

Finish date: August 6, 2017

Discussion: 2017 Read Harder Challenge

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2017 Read Harder Challenge

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What Members Thought

Sep 28, 2012 Marisa rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: grown-up-books, non-fiction

Excellent book. I thought the phrase "a biography of cancer" was just sort of a clever marketing ploy or maybe an overstatement, but it's actually completely accurate. When I explained to people who had never heard of this book what it was, I couldn't help but notice it sounded both boring and incredibly depressing. It's just about the farthest thing from boring I can imagine -- I generally have a not so great relationship with non-fiction. I enjoy it, and I'm usually pretty stimulated by it at Excellent book. I thought the phrase "a biography of cancer" was just sort of a clever marketing ploy or maybe an overstatement, but it's actually completely accurate. When I explained to people who had never heard of this book what it was, I couldn't help but notice it sounded both boring and incredibly depressing. It's just about the farthest thing from boring I can imagine -- I generally have a not so great relationship with non-fiction. I enjoy it, and I'm usually pretty stimulated by it at first. But there almost always comes a point, usually about 1/2 to 3/4 of the way through the book, when I just don't feel it anymore. I want a plot, I long for a narrative. I slow down and start supplementing with a novel, or give up completely. This was one of only a handful of non-fiction that didn’t happen with -- I wanted to keep reading, I felt compelled to know what was going to happen next.

It is marginally depressing, but it's also very hopeful. "Cancer" as a word is actually kind of inaccurate I think -- it leads us to believe that there's one disease, and therefor there should be one cure. But really, there are so many vastly different forms of cancer, and a different way to combat each of them. Some forms of cancer that were devastating and invariably led to a quick and painful death decades ago can now easily be controlled enough that most individuals diagnosed with them barely have a change in life expectancy. Yet, there have been few advancements in the cure or abatement of many other kinds of cancer. The good news is, scientists are beginning to understand the structure and progression of cancers much more clearly now, so advancements may well be on the way.

This book seems so "big" and encompasses such an impressive time frame that I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around it enough (with Blue's Clues jabbering on relentlessly in the background)to formulate any additional salient discussion points at the moment...maybe I'll review my dog ears and add more later. ...more

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Nov 20, 2017 eb rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, audio-book, adult, cancer-illness, history, biography, male-author, poc-author, science, male-narrator

Reading this was a similar experience to reading a Stephen Hawking book: you can tell the author is so phenomenally intelligent that they can make even the most thorny scientific problems or ideas intelligible. The narrator was a bit stuffy, but the prose was interesting and illuminating.

Ultimately, it is a terrible downer, though. The sheer number of daunting statistics that Mukherjee lays out over the course of the narrative point to a minuscule amount of progress in combatting cancer over it' ...more

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Mar 17, 2018 Nick rated it liked it · review of another edition

Mukherjee does a good job of making an incredibly dense and complicated topic engaging and interesting for the lay person. When the book got to genetics and recent developments in cancer research, this task became virtually impossible and it became really easy to lose the thread of the narrative. But still a worthwhile read.

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