SPECIAL/PULITZER FOR DR MUKHERJEE
The Emperor of All Maladies wins
over The King’s Speech
Arthur J Pais analyzes the magic
of Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee’s
Pulitzer-winning work
Thomas and ... Stephen Jay Gould.’
Tony Judt, distinguished historian, essayist and
professor who was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s
Disease in 2008 and died last year, read Mukherjee’s
book with some urgency given his medical condition
— and the length of the book.
‘Sid Mukherjee’s book is a pleasure to read, if that is
the right word,’ mused Judt, the author of Ill Fares the
Land. ‘Cancer today is widely regarded as the worst of
all the diseases from which one might suffer — if only
because it is fast becoming the most common. Dr.
Mukherjee explains how this perception came about,
how cancer has been regarded across the years and
what is now being done to treat its protean forms. His
book is the clearest account I have read on this sub-
ject. With The Emperor of All Maladies, he joins that
small fraternity of practicing doctors who can not just
talk about their profession but write about it.’
‘Cancer was an all-consuming presence in our lives,’
Mukherjee writes in the first chapter of The Emperor
of All Maladies. ‘It invaded our imaginations; it occu-
pied our memories; it infiltrated every conversation,
every thought. And if we, as physicians, found our-
selves immersed in cancer, then our patients found
their lives virtually obliterated by the disease.’
‘In 2010, about six hundred thousand Americans,
and more than 7 million humans around the world,
will die of cancer,’ Dr Mukherjee notes in his book.
While he cannot offer any startling hope, he writes
eloquently about those who are passionately looking
for a cure.
‘In Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward,
Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a youthful Russian in his
midforties, discovers that he has a tumor in his neck
and is immediately whisked
away into a cancer ward in
some nameless hospital in the
frigid north,’ Mukherjee writes
in his book. ‘The diagnosis of
cancer — not the disease, but
the mere stigma of its presence
— becomes a death sentence
for Rusanov. The illness strips
him of his identity. It dresses
him in a patient’s smock (a
tragicomically cruel costume,
no less blighting than a prison-
er’s jumpsuit) and assumes
absolute control of his actions.
To be diagnosed with cancer,
Rusanov discovers, is to enter a
borderless medical gulag, a
state even more invasive and
paralyzing than the one that he
has left behind.
(Solzhenitsyn may have
intended his absurdly totalitarian cancer hospital to paral-
lel the absurdly totalitarian state outside it, yet when I once
asked a woman with invasive cervical cancer about the par-
allel, she said sardonically, “Unfortunately, I did not need
any metaphors to read the book. The cancer ward was my
confining state, my prison.”)’
Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee’s book is a medical mystery, a memoir, a history of a relentlessly stubborn disease
Having walked out of a pretentious French film at the Toronto International Film Festival last September and with over an hour to kill
before I could watch the next film which had a lot of
Oscar buzz, I decided to read a chapter of Siddhartha
Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A History
of Cancer.
Just one chapter, I said, and began reading it, slow-
ly sipping a tall cup of organic green tea. I had a copy
of the book, which was to be published a few weeks
later. It took me just about an hour to get hooked, and
I did not care if the next film had received the top
honors at Cannes or was really Oscar-worthy. In
about three hours I had read over 100 pages, shame-
lessly occupying a corner of a bookshop, and had even
forgotten to finish my tea.
By the next evening, I had skipped The King’s
Speech and an insightful documentary about financial
skullduggery on Wall Street. A friendly bookseller at
Chapters asked me what I was reading. “A complicat-
ed book,” I said. “But you won’t be able to put it down.
It is a medical mystery, a memoir; history of a relent-
lessly stubborn disease. I suggest you don’t start read-
ing it over the weekend. You may forget you have a
family or friends or a pet.”
For the next three days, this epic saga would become
an addiction.
Where would the bookshops be storing it, the
friendly bookseller wondered; under medicine, biog-
raphy, history? “Do you have a prose-poetry section,” I
asked. “You can keep it any section and it will be a
bestseller many times over.”
In the past months, I have seen this eloquent, heart-
felt, pulse-increasing, compulsively engaging, nearly
600-page epic ensconcing on bestseller lists and win-
ning honors from some of the most powerful review-
ers and fellow writers. I have also seen the book
placed under a number of categories, including literature.
Now that it has won the Pulitzer Prize — one of the most
coveted awards in America — in the general nonfiction cat-
egory, the hard cover version is surely going to get a big new
push, followed by solid sales and a longer bestseller status
when it is out in paperback edition in a few months.
The Pulitzer committee called Mukherjee’s book ‘an ele-
gant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long
history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment
breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.’ It triumphed
over The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our
Brain, by Nicholas Carr, and Empire of the Summer Moon:
Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the
Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S C
Gwynne.
The life-affirming Emperor of All Maladies, written by
Mukherjee, a Columbia University oncologist, professor
and researcher, is also the history of a disease many people
will talk of only in hushed tones. It offers an overview of the
disease’s history over 5,000 years. The characters in it
range from the Persian Queen Atossa whose Greek slave
cut off her malignant breast, to the 19th century recipients
of radiation and chemotherapy, to Mukherjee’s leukemia
patient Carla, who is featured in the first chapter. Among
the people who are obsessed in finding a cure are Sidney
Farber and philanthropist
Mary Lasker. Farber
developed the first suc-
cessful chemotherapy for
childhood leukemia.
Emperor of Maladies is a
book where hope and fail-
ure are never apart.
Stethoscope diaries
From Anton Chekov to Robin Cook, there is no
shortage of doctors who have turned to a distin-
guished writing career. Among distinguished
Indian-American doctor-writers is Abraham
Verghese whose paperback novel Cutting for
Stone has spent over 60 weeks on The New York
Times Book Review bestseller list. The same list
also has Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto,
which is on the paperback how-to list for over two
months. And then there is of course Deepak
Chopra, whose books range in themes from holis-
tic medicine to biographies of religious leaders
like Buddha and Prophet Mohammad.
