The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Fourth Estate HK$149
It's hard to imagine a more beguiling and illuminating 'biography' being written about the 'shape-shifting entity' we call cancer. Siddhartha Mukherjee, an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and Rhodes scholar who is both an oncologist and cancer researcher, says at the onset of his mesmerising book that he came to view it as a biography because 'it is an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality and to demystify its behaviour'.
But in doing so, Mukherjee has also managed to enter the mindsets of those who have attempted to treat it, cure it, understand it, or come to terms with it across the ages. So the Emperor of All Maladies is not only an account of a formidable disease that has stalked us for 4,000 years, but also a powerful tale of human hubris, misperception and arrogance as well as inventiveness, resilience and perseverance.
It's also a moving personal account of the author's own coming of age as an oncologist. It begins with an account of one of his own patients, Carla Reed, a 30-year-old kindergarten teacher whose questions about the nature and history of her acute lymphoblastic leukaemia echoed his own and those of his other patients. Questions that impelled him to write the book. How old is cancer? What are the roots of our battle against this disease? Where are we in the 'war' on cancer? Is there an end?
Shifting between the past and present, Mukherjee weaves Carla's story and the stories of countless others into his narrative with a profound empathy for those who inhabit 'the kingdom of the sick', as Susan Sontag once put it. Indeed it is Sontag's words about the onerous 'citizenship of illness' that preface the book, her famed eloquence matched in no small measure by Mukherjee's own as he recounts centuries of discoveries and setbacks, triumphs and deaths in our efforts to deal with this disease.
Carla has now entered the kingdom of cancer, a realm unto itself and whose power Mukherjee too senses, even from its periphery, as 'a dense, gravitational tug that pulls everything and everyone' into its orbit. It's impossible to enter the pages of The Emperor of All Maladies without experiencing a similar gravitational pull.
Mukherjee has a novelist's command of character and place, a poet's instinct for metaphor and rhythm as well as an unparalleled ability to distil complex science into page-turning drama. You soon find yourself sharing his almost visceral admiration for an entity that has haunted us for centuries, yet has come to shadow our lives more potently than at any time in human history, thanks, in large part, to our longevity. Since the vanquishing of killer diseases such as the plague, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis, this ancient disease has emerged, or rather, as Mukherjee puts it, was 'unveiled' to become the defining 'modern disease' of our time.