Indian-American’s book on cancer on NYT bestsellers’ list
By IANSFriday, December 3, 2010
WASHINGTON - Indian American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book “The Emperor of All Maladies” on the history of cancer and its treatment has made it to the New York Times list of Best Sellers.
The book figures 12th in the hard cover non-fiction category with rankings reflecting sales for the week ended Nov 21.
New Delhi born Mukherjee’s “powerful and ambitious first book” as the Times said in a recent review tells “one of the most extraordinary stories in medicine: a history of cancer, which will kill about 600,000 Americans by the end of this year, and more than seven million people around the planet.”
“He frames it as a biography, ‘an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behavior.’ It is an epic story that he seems compelled to tell, the way a passionate young priest might attempt a biography of Satan,” the US daily said
Mukherjee started on the road to this book when he began advanced training in cancer medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in the summer of 2003.
The Times describes “The Emperor of All Maladies” as a history of eureka moments and decades of despair.
“Mukherjee stitches stories of his own patients into this history, not always smoothly. But they are very strong, well-written and unsparing of himself,” the reviewer said.
— Indo-Asian News Service
