{"id":10484,"date":"2011-09-25T05:09:58","date_gmt":"2011-09-25T05:09:58","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-09-24T22:09:39","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T22:09:39","slug":"Meet-my-friend-Cancer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=10484","title":{"rendered":"Meet my friend Cancer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just finished reading this book and it is a must read for anyone who has been affected by cancer in one way or another.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Emperor of All Maladies is a magnificent, profoundly humane \u201cbiography\u201d of cancer\u2014from its first documented appearances thousands of years ago through the epic battles in the twentieth century to cure, control, and conquer it to a radical new understanding of its essence. Physician, researcher, and award-winning science writer, Siddhartha Mukherjee examines cancer with a cellular biologist\u2019s precision, a historian\u2019s perspective, and a biographer\u2019s passion. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with\u2014and perished from\u2014for more than five thousand years. The story of cancer is a story of human ingenuity, resilience, and perseverance, but also of hubris, paternalism, and misperception. 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 \u201cwar against cancer.\u201d The book reads like a literary thriller with cancer as the protagonist. From the Persian Queen Atossa, whose Greek slave may have cut off her diseased breast, to the nineteenth-century recipients of primitive radiation and chemotherapy to Mukherjee\u2019s own leukemia patient, Carla, The Emperor of All Maladies is about the people who have soldiered through fiercely demanding regimens in order to survive\u2014and to increase our understanding of this iconic disease. Riveting, urgent, and surprising, The Emperor of All Maladies provides a fascinating glimpse into the future of cancer treatments. It is an illuminating book that provides hope and clarity to those seeking to demystify cancer.<\/p>\n

The author, a Rhodes scholar, said in an interview that when he started writing the book in 2005 he thought of cancer as a disease, but as he wrote, he began to start seeing it as something that \u201cenvelops our lives so fully that it was like writing about someone, it was like writing about an alter personality, an illness that had a psyche, a behavior, a pattern of existing.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

After finishing this book, I thought of the movie “The Doctor” starring William Hurt. If you haven’t seen that movie you should.<\/p>\n

The doctor – William Hurt<\/strong><\/p>\n