A three-part, six-hour documentary series based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning cancer biography written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center debuts on PBS stations March 30 and continues on March 31 and April 1. Read more about the series, here.
The novel was a winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and can be rented or purchased online, here (or check your local library!). A description of the book can be found below.
The Emperor of All Maladies
is a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer—from its
first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic
battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a
radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and
award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a
cellular biologist’s precision, a historian’s perspective, and a
biographer’s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent
chronicle of a disease humans have lived with—and perished from—for more
than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human
ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris,
paternalism, and misperception. Mukherjee recounts centuries of
discoveries, setbacks, victories, and deaths, told through the eyes of
his predecessors and peers, training their wits against an infinitely
resourceful adversary that, just three decades ago, was thought to be
easily vanquished in an all-out “war against cancer.” The book reads
like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the
Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave cut off her malignant breast, to
the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and
chemotherapy to Mukherjee’s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies
is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding
regimens in order to survive—and to increase our understanding of this
iconic disease. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies
provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It
is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking
to demystify cancer. (Source)
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