While treating and researching cancer, Stanford alum SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE has also documented the disease and the battle against it in The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
The book landed this year’s Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and was described by the judges as “an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science.”
Mukherjee, who received his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences in 1993, is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Center. He was a Rhodes Scholar and received degrees from Oxford and Harvard Medical School.
The Emperor of All Maladies blends medical, historical and biographical writing to trace cancer’s 5,000-year history and the victims, survivors and doctors who have confronted it. The book was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and was cited by the New York Times Book Review as one of the 10 best books in 2010. It is published by Scribner.
See the Pulitzer announcement.
