Book of the week: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

(Scribner, 571 pages, $30)

It’s time to add another physician to the ranks of “great doctor-writers,” said Susan Okie in The Washington Post. With this so-called biography of cancer, oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee has given us a comprehensive and lucidly drawn look at one of the developed world’s leading killers. From the first recorded mention of the disease some 4,600 years ago through 21st-century efforts to unlock the cancer genome, Mukherjee traces humankind’s understanding of cancer’s causes and the long search for a cure in language that is both plain-spoken and poetic. Long as the story may be, though, most of the action kicks in only in the past 100 years or so, “when a steady rise in life expectancy” allowed this disease of mutating cells to creep into more and more lives.

The book is actually less a biography of the disease than “the definitive history of cancer’s enemies,” said Jacob Appel in The Boston Globe. The author can be blunt about caregivers’ missteps. One of the book’s darkest passages concerns William Halsted, a 19th-century Baltimore surgeon who performed mastectomies that left his breast-cancer patients horrifically disfigured. Mostly, though, anyone whose efforts advanced human knowledge wins praise. Among the book’s most important figures are Sidney Farber, a Boston doctor who pioneered targeted chemical treatments, and Mary Lasker, a socialite who helped create a government-backed “war” on the disease. “At the core” of the saga, though, are the many scientists and ward clinicians who’ve fought a quieter battle.

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A big part of the story is still left out, said Steven Shapin in The New Yorker. When Mukherjee talks about “causes,” he’s focused solely on “cellular mechanisms gone wrong” rather than on any features of our environment that might be triggering the mayhem. Still, few books written for a general audience have “rendered any area of modern science with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion.” Mukherjee includes stories about his own patients throughout, beginning with Carla, a young woman he treats for leukemia. Though he is skeptical that cancer can be defeated anytime soon, he sees hope in the anti-leukemia drug Gleevec because it works by targeting a known cancer gene. Near the end of the book, he brings Carla flowers and “permission to count herself cured.” In his field, “five years in total remission is as good as good news gets.”