Review of Emperor of Maladies and an update on another review...

Original written March 14, 2011

So I finished Go, Mutants! the other day, and it's a really good book. I highly enjoyed it and will gladly recommend it to anyone. However, the last 5 chapters or so, almost brought the whole book to a grinding halt. And since if I explain it, it will totally ruin the book for you, I'll just say it was done in such a way that took away from the overall feeling and atmosphere of the book, and you lost connection with the main character at a seriously pivotal time in his life, so it would have been awesome to see his POV! But that's all I'll say about it. On my scale of 1 to 10 (10 being orgasmic and 1 being hari kari)... I give it a solid 7.5 It lost .5 points because of the ending. Sorry, Mr. Doyle.

Another book I finished the other day was The Emperor of All the Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. A very insightful and terrifying look into the history of cancer. Mukherjee is an oncologist who wrote this "biography of cancer" after years of painful and diligent research into the annals of the war on cancer. From the first hieroglyphics from the medicine man Imhotep describing what would late be identified as cancer and writing the damning words: "There is no cure"; to the ancient accounts of Queen Atossa asking her Greek slave to cut off her cancer-riddled breast; to the 1800-1900's trial and error horrors of early chemotherapy drug trials on children with leukemia; to our more current history of the last 20 years and the many advances in technology of today, this book shows how cancer has always been around in the history of humanity; it is not a "new disease".

But the prevalance of cancer in people has risen due to the understanding of what the disease is, and also the rise in carcinogens in our world. It is a thick, dense looking tome, but it reads very easy, more like fiction than a heavy medical book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who like history, medicine, or has had a personal touch with cancer (yourself or someone you know). At times this book was hard for me to read, given my mom lost her fight with breast cancer, but it was a good thing for me to read. There has been so many advances in drugs and more specific-cancer fighting drugs that have been engineered to target certain cancers, like lung, breast, colon, leukemia, etc. So yeah. Not my normal genre of book for me, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. I give Emperor of All Maladies a strong rating of 8 on my scale of 1 (hari kari) to 10 (literary orgasmic bliss).