This year's Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction was awarded this week to Siddartha Mukherjee for Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
I wrote about this book in the fall. I hadn't read it at that point, and just wrote about how fascinating it looked. I asked my wife to buy it for me for Christmas. It's kind of a non-traditional gift request for a cancer patient, I'll admit. Isabel didn't buy it for me -- probably blocked it out, and who can blame her? -- and she still feels a little guilty about it.
I did end up taking it out of the library, but it was so new that I only had 2 weeks to look at it before I had to return it, and I got through maybe a third of it. It was fascinating. I can tell you that the prologue completely sucked me in. You can read it yourself here; scroll down for the prologue reprint, and then go back to the top for a podcast interview with Mukherjee from Fresh Air. Mukherjee can write -- not just about the science behind cancer, but about the people behind cancer -- patients and doctors -- as well. The story in the prologue about Carla Reed started to stir up some unpleasant feelings in my gut, thinking about the kind of uncertainty that comes right after a diagnosis. Not fun, but I kept on reading. It's a really compelling book.
The Pulitzer Prize is a very big deal, and the citation for the award calls the book "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science."
I give it two thumbs up (or maybe two lymph nodes up?) and look forwrad to reading the rest of it this summer. About as appropriate for beach reading as it is for a Christmas gift, but I'm going to do it anyway.
I wrote about this book in the fall. I hadn't read it at that point, and just wrote about how fascinating it looked. I asked my wife to buy it for me for Christmas. It's kind of a non-traditional gift request for a cancer patient, I'll admit. Isabel didn't buy it for me -- probably blocked it out, and who can blame her? -- and she still feels a little guilty about it.
I did end up taking it out of the library, but it was so new that I only had 2 weeks to look at it before I had to return it, and I got through maybe a third of it. It was fascinating. I can tell you that the prologue completely sucked me in. You can read it yourself here; scroll down for the prologue reprint, and then go back to the top for a podcast interview with Mukherjee from Fresh Air. Mukherjee can write -- not just about the science behind cancer, but about the people behind cancer -- patients and doctors -- as well. The story in the prologue about Carla Reed started to stir up some unpleasant feelings in my gut, thinking about the kind of uncertainty that comes right after a diagnosis. Not fun, but I kept on reading. It's a really compelling book.
The Pulitzer Prize is a very big deal, and the citation for the award calls the book "an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science."
I give it two thumbs up (or maybe two lymph nodes up?) and look forwrad to reading the rest of it this summer. About as appropriate for beach reading as it is for a Christmas gift, but I'm going to do it anyway.
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