What is your definition of a superhero ? Its the small town lawyer who decides to fight against the medical insurance behemoths because they didn't cover his sister's breast cancer treatment, its a pair of driven scientists who spent months walking the corridors of a giant Pharmaceutical company to convince them to mass produce a cancer medicine even though it was for a small variant of cancer and might not earn the company a lot of money, its the clinical researchers who stood their ground against the tobacco companies to push awareness about lung cancer and finally its the countless surgeons, hematologists and geneticists who spent their literal lifetime against a formidable foe and by solving a small piece of the puzzle saved thousands of lives.
"The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee is a brilliant masterpiece. It is superbly written and extraordinarily insightful. The research that must have gone behind writing this book is astounding - almost every page of this roughly 600 pages book has at least two references.
It covers the history of Cancer starting from its first recorded occurrence in the Egyptian texts some 2500 years ago all the way to today's Cancer Genome Atlas. It has riveting accounts of numerous wins and losses by researchers against Cancer and how our collective understanding of this disease has progressed. The book mostly talks about the data from the US and western European countries and the writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, openly admits to that. But that being said, this book will leave you speechless.
IMO, everyone should read this, period.
