The recap
Siddhartha Mukherjee, a cancer physician, set out to answer a question a patient once asked him: what, exactly, was she fighting? The result is a sweeping "biography" of cancer, following the disease from descriptions in ancient medical writings to the laboratories and clinics of today. Mukherjee traces how doctors first tried to cut tumors out, then to poison them, then to target them with ever more precise tools, and how each era's confidence was tested by the disease's talent for adapting. Along the way he profiles the surgeons, chemists, activists and patients whose determination, and occasionally whose hubris, shaped modern oncology, and he explains how normal cells go rogue in language any curious reader can follow. Woven through the history are scenes from his own training, which give the book its emotional weight. It is serious and often sobering, yet the storytelling is so assured that long stretches read like a novel. Readers come away understanding not only cancer, but how medicine itself learns.
Why read it
For readers who want to understand cancer as a scientific and human story, including anyone whose life it has touched. It also suits fans of narrative history who like big ideas told through people.
Fun facts
- 01
Mukherjee has said the book is a very long answer to a question from a patient he treated in Boston, who wanted to know what she was battling; he could not point her to a single book that explained it.
- 02
It won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
- 03
It also won the 2011 Guardian First Book Award, as the only non-fiction title on a shortlist otherwise made up of novels.
- 04
The book became a three-part, six-hour PBS documentary directed by Barak Goodman, with Ken Burns as executive producer, narrated by the actor Edward Herrmann.
