Siddhartha Mukherjee , a cancer specialist of Indian origin, and an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, has won the 2011Pulitzer in general non-fiction category.The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, is his first book where Mukherjee, 40, has narrated the struggle that has gone through the centuries with the dreaded disease. He has analyzed his subject with care and precision balancing it with an involvement that marks a good writer.Having grown up in Delhi and studied at St Columba's School, Mukherjee moved to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar to train as a cellular biologist. His book has been listed in "The 10 Best Books of 2010" by The New York Times and the "Top 10 Non-fiction Books" by the Time magazine.
The Pulitzer award citation described The Emperor of All Maladies as "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science". The Pulitzer website states that the book is a "magnificent, profoundly humane biography of cancer".
Mukherjee is the fourth person from India to have been awarded the coveted prize which carries a $10,000 award.India-born Dr. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Centre.
A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School.
He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times and The New Republic.
In his book, Dr. 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“.
An award-winning science writer, Dr. 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 that humans have lived with — and perished from — for more than 5,000 years.
The “riveting, urgent and surprising” book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist.
It is a profoundly humane “biography” of cancer — from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the 20th century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence.
“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,” according to information on the book on Pulitzer’s website.
The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments besides providing hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.
No comments:
Post a Comment