《The Emperor of All Maladies》简介：

Starred Review. Mukherjee's debut book is a sweeping epic of obsession, brilliant researchers, dramatic new treatments, euphoric success and tragic failure, and the relentless battle by scientists and patients alike against an equally relentless, wily, and elusive enemy. From the first chemotherapy developed from textile dyes to the possibilities emerging from our understanding of cancer cells, Mukherjee shapes a massive amount of history into a coherent story with a roller-coaster trajectory: the discovery of a new treatment–surgery, radiation, chemotherapy–followed by the notion that if a little is good, more must be better, ending in disfiguring radical mastectomy and multidrug chemo so toxic the treatment ended up being almost worse than the disease. The first part of the book is driven by the obsession of Sidney Farber and philanthropist Mary Lasker to find a unitary cure for all cancers. (Farber developed the first successful chemotherapy for childhood leukemia.) The last and most exciting part is driven by the race of brilliant, maverick scientists to understand how cells become cancerous. Each new discovery was small, but as Mukherjee, a Columbia professor of medicine, writes, "Incremental advances can add up to transformative changes." Mukherjee's formidable intelligence and compassion produce a stunning account of the effort to disrobe the "emperor of maladies." (Nov.) (c)

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《The Emperor of All Maladies》摘录：

“And there is a subtler reason to remember this story: while the content of medicine is constantly changing, its form, I suspect, remains astonishingly the same. History repeats, but science reverberates. The tools that we will use to battle cancer in the future will doubtless alter so dramatically in fifty years that the geography of cancer prevention and therapy might be unrecognizable. Future physicians may laugh at our mixing of primitive cocktails of poisons to kill the most elemental and magisterial disease known to our species. But much about this battle will remain the same: the relentlessness, the inventiveness, the resilience, the queasy pivoting between defeatism and hope, the hypnotic drive for universal solutions, the disappointment of defeat, the arrogance and the hubris.” E...

《The Emperor of All Maladies》目录：

Author's Note xiii
Prologue 1
Part 1 "Of blacke cholor, without boyling" 9
Part 2 An Impatient War 105
Part 3 "Will you turn me out if I can't get better?" 191
Part 4 Prevention is the Cure 235
Part 5 "A Distorted Version of Our Normal Selves" 335
Part 6 The Fruits of Long Endeavors 393
Atossa's War 461
Acknowledgments 471
Notes 473
Glossary 533
Selected Bibliography 537
Photograph Credits 543
Index 545
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